Design Masters: What could possibly go wrong?

It's a bird... It's an Ekranoplan!

You can see the Ekranoplan here, in Google Maps:

Google Maps

And in case you miss it in that article, the pictures (somewhat bigger versions) come from this blog:

http://igor113.livejournal.com/51213.html

Aye, the Caspian Sea Monster:

the caspian sea monster - Google Search

It has been around forever, mysterious and intriguing but built on a platform of paranoia and cheap fuel.

My hat of to the designers however, the idea is good, but not the results.

It was a hideous hydroplane, but a strangely beautiful behemoth. This is the first time I've seen one with launch tubes on top of the fuselage. Can't help but question the drag coefficient...

Anyone notice the 'hinged' steps under the hull to break surface tension? Cutting edge stuff in the day!

Ground effect is a very interesting place to experiment. Have done it over water, but in the "olden days"before anything flying low was suspect, flying around over the dry lake beds in Nevada and Utah in ground effect I could reach VNE at ridiculously low power settings. To put it politely the range at those speeds vastly outdistanced the capacity of my bladder. I wonder what the Russians could have achieved with ground effect vehicles like the Ekranoplane if they'd kept on developing it. Anyone got a spare A380 they want to play with in ground effect? Why do I have the suspicion that the average air passenger would be uncomfortable looking out his window at the ground or water passing by at 400+mph maybe 50 feet below him. What water spout?

Therein lies the problem:

The efficiencies only come around at 1/2 a wing span of altitude...

Less than 10 years ago a friend of mine bought a "Ground Effect" vehicle factory/operation and promised me a job to drive these things commercially:
I was a good candidate holding both a USCG and FAA sea-plane ticket.

Long story short, the prototype crashed and years of development and research (Partially based on the Russian work) came to nothing.

The test pilot who crashed told me it was just an un-stable airplane and he proved it by flying up to 1,300 feet..No ground effect.

The man had serious jam to take it up out of ground effect if that was all it was designed for. Power available must have been significant. Was this the project in North Carolina or Georgia where they were working on rad alt control overrides with 4 or five senders spread out all over the vehicle?

I first saw pictures of the Caspian Sea Monster in the mid 70's when I was an intelligence officer in the US Army. We spent a lot of time trying figure WTF it was.

By the way, you can order one through Bentley Yachts

Hi,

What about this thing.

UFO FOUND IN BALTIC SEA ( MAINSTREAM REPORT ) - YouTube

The Thing? Scary choice of words if you remember the remake some years ago. Especially the walking head.

As you know, YouTube offers up related videos on their sidebar. Could this be the alien species found in the Baltic Sea UFO crash...?

venom headcrab - YouTube

Nah, it had a Ford V-6 rated at 260 HP.

No, this builder was out of Rhode Island.
They had a couple of prototypes and kept tinkering with them, but after the crash the whole thing fell apart.

The idea was to operate between St. Croix and St. Thomas; I pilot and 5 pax.

The report I got from the test pilot was that the WIG was so unstable you had to "fly" it all the time and it kind of wore you out. One guy could not drive these things a full day. They had planned change of crew every few hours.

Selling Ekranoplan Wing in ground effect Flying ship - YouTube

I wonder if...

My dad was a Marine Corps Tail-gunner in a TBF Avenger during WW II. He
rarely spoke of his WW II experiences, mostly limited to duty in the South Pacific.

I do recall him talking about how tiresome, and boring it would become after
hours of flying "15 ft" above the water on the days they had no enemy contact.

I wonder if 'ground effects' played a part in this tactic ?

Or just being sneaky as he said...

Flying anything in ground effect for any distance can be a little challenging. Microthermals, little bubbles of warmed air, are being released from the surface and must be anticipated and reacted to all the time. Over land it's more of a factor than over water but still something that must be dealt with in either venue. There have been discussions in the past after sudden loss of control incidents, even with highly wing loaded military aircraft, that microthermals were one of the initiators of the sudden and otherwise unexplained rolls in to the ground. The Ekranoplane, just due to it's size and weight, may not be completely immune to this issue, but I'd suspect that it would be less affected than anything I've ever flown in ground effect.
Nobody offering up an A380 for me to try this out with?

True, but with exceptions:

Made in the U.K...

I would humbly disagree. Perhaps a different source of reading material, but the quote I have in mind goes more like " The British have hot water bottles, the French fake it well and the Russians have ( I can't quote it since all you'd see is a stretch of xxxxxxs) but this might make the point... Youtube enter:
SEREBRO - Song #1 (Английская Версия)

Apologies. I was thinking about Russian moving objects within ground effect.