Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel
spectrum.ieee.org41 points by rbanffy 3 days ago
41 points by rbanffy 3 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/user/RCtestflight
RCtestflight has a bunch of cool ground effect videos.
"The Seaglider is designed to handle ocean swells up to a meter and a half high" - that severely limits where it can be used or during which seasons.
It would be cool to have a fast electric ferry service around the Bay Area. Ride your e-bike to the ferry terminal and get to the other side! Cool traffic dodge.
I think Navier was doing some but it was limited, specific routes and a while back. But it's something to look into.
TBD but I'm hoping those constraints are largely in taxi mode! When it's flying it's much higher up:
> Like similar “Type A” WIGs, the Viceroy’s preferred altitude is about half the length of its 19.8-meter wingspan, so 10 meters above the water. Much above that and a WIG can no longer exploit its aerodynamic edge, and loses stability.
I really want something like this to work, ideally so successfully that it keeps scaling up. Theres such beautiful aerodynamic efficiency from WIG.
Also a huge fan of what looks like a very smart lift generating blown wing, which also could really help this get out of the water fast, give it good efficiency
I guess you might be able to get around this problem if the vehicle can take off and land on a land based airstrip and then stay at 10m over the water. Otherwise that is a crippling limitation since you not only need the ocean to be relatively calm when taking off, but also when landing.
Usually these planes take off and land on rivers, bays, and other protected shores with few waves.
For FAA purposes this is 100% not a plane.
Regulatory arbitrage is part of the value.
Physics doesn’t care about regulations though. I hope the people who fly these are certified to fly passengers.
>> like this to work, ideally so successfully that it keeps scaling up.
There are hard scale issues. The wings must remain close to the water for ground effect to be a thing. But the thing still needs to bank to turn. That means one wingtip getting higher to the point it can lose GE lift, and the other lower to the point it might strike a bigger-than-average wave. The longer the wings, the less the craft can bank in a turn. Get too large and in-ground-effect flight becomes impractical/dangerous.
Good concerns honestly.
I wonder how much turning you could get just from adjusting motors. Especially if each of those 12 motors can individually adjust, I'd imagine you could get some decent yaw.
Also as per the quote which helpfully points out, WIG is typically flying half it's wing height. Since wingspan and altitude are thus linearly corresponded I'm not not sure (not convinced either way) that there's a problem (or not) from wingspan.
China has also been developing secret modern erkanoplans https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-WIG-2025-07.html
wonder if this is how China expects to invade Taiwan.
The sea state in the Taiwan Strait is often pretty rough. If WIG vehicles have any military value it's likely to be on inland waters where weather conditions are typically more benign.
The hisutton.com website is full of the recent Chinese naval developments, including huge floating landing piers and various novel submarines and ships. The pace and scale of investment is such that it seems they are building the capacity to genuinely do an opposed invasion
Here's hoping for many good-weather/calm seas days...
Loved ground effect since I first saw it on (iirc) beyond 2000 television program. I haven't been able to find any reference to that episode...
Everything old is new again: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2001/1001/110.html
And https://www.seacheetah.com/ and https://seawingsproject.eu/
I wonder how many of these will survive the bursting tech bubble?
Do you have any good examples of tech that was immediately embraced without any prior examples or failures to monetize? I'm having trouble thinking of any.
Be interesting to see the efficiency metrics on this compared to high aspect ratio planes.
What's the advantage over a catamaran or hydrofoil ferry?
Cavitation limits hydrofoil top speeds to ~60 knots. Although, there's a neat profile that just ignores top surface lift entirely [1] (probably at the expense of drag?).
[1] https://www.metstrade.com/news/sustainability/record-hunters...
Speed. 290km/h is pretty quick by maritime standards.
And comfort. With a 1.5m swell, you're gonna feel that in a boat. A hydrofoil will still go up and down.
Whereas a ground-effect vehicle is still flying, so a lot smoother.
Hitting a partially submerged log or lost shipping container is pretty rough on hydrofoil ferries.
10m seems quite high for ground effect?
Ground effect height is a function of the size of the wing. I'm guessing these are going to have to be massive to be of any use, otherwise you'd be so close to the water that you couldn't "fly" in choppy water, and with a strong headwind you'll need even more margin because I'm guessing that waves moving with the wind are going to reduce the ground effect.
The picture has a pilot included - suggests this is a pretty small plane with very stubby wing.
According to the article the ground-effect ceiling is around half the wingspan of 20m.
Imagine a fleet of these as ferries between Hawaii's islands for example. Awesome stuff, best of luck to the team!
Except for those pesky waves that Hawaii is known for.
I see this as more applicable in areas coastal metro areas with sheltered waterways and existing ferry systems.
Yup. There's a reason that every photo of these (admittedly cool) vehicles is on a clear day, over calm water.