The Ekranoplan Is Stranded Off a Beach
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
Apparently there was a security guard, but they were asleep!
"hey we're just here to take pictures for a magazine article, may we get a tour of the vessel?"
"um, no"
"we can pay you for the trouble"
"um, fine"
https://www.tiktok.com/@rusik.ibragimoff/video/6862108775214...
The USSR had an other Lun planned ("Spasatel", which was intended as a mobile field hospital but was not completed due to the fall of the USSR), as well as a bunch of other models in prototyping, development or active use (Orlyonok having been pretty much the only somewhat successful one, but also much more flexible than Lun: Orlyonok can fly way above ground-effect altitude).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24152959
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6230218
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503760
Others?
OTOH a "warship of similar capacity" is a large-ish patrol boat, Lun-class is about the same weight as a Cyclone-class. It's really not much of a warship.
NATO considered it a super fast patrol boat, and the soviets really doubled down on missile boats.
The range of the Lun’s missiles out ranged its radar, which was a problem that missile boats of that era also had. Nato imagined that a forward Lun would act as scout for the rest etc with lots of coordination.
The Lun’s problem was that by the time it entered trials the soviet missile boats were being fitted with a over horizon radar that the Lun couldn’t carry.
That, and the end of the Cold War, of course.
The best motivation a rower can have is a swan trying to give you a push up the river.
And I wonder why. Fast, efficient transport sounds perfect for today. The Caspian Sea is a limited area, but is there a reason these things can't work on the ocean? How close to the ground does it need to fly? Are waves already a problem?
That they're mostly sea-bound makes them rather inconvenient and inflexible, and they're not actually fast compared to other planes. And while they're very fast compared to ships, they're then significantly less efficient or capable (capacity-wise). So their niche is rather limited.
> How close to the ground does it need to fly?
About half the wingspan for maximum effect. There is reduced effect up to about the wingspan. Beyond that you're pretty much outside of ground effect.
It also has all the usual issues of seaplanes, except more so: it's very hard to take-off with any sort of waves, and in high winds the plane must take off into the wind, meaning it hits every wave straight on, which is both uncomfortable for the passengers and stressful for the structure.
Sure but now you're increasing drag, so you're lowering speed.
A plane takes advantage of the much thinner atmosphere higher up to go farther easier, while an ekranoplan has to plum along under an ocean of air sapping its fuel efficiency. No GEV design I'm aware of (feel free to correct!) could make it across any ocean without stopping for refueling, and many can't even island-hop across the ocean. You'd need to construct refueling stations in the middle of the ocean.
GEVs need calm, flat water to take off. This makes the above refueling stations even more challenging, as any vehicle that lands to top up may not be able to get airborne again. This seems a minor point, but it's why we abandoned seaplanes - it's just not worth the effort of waiting for the seas to calm when a plane on an asphalt runway is always ready to go.
GEVs are awkward to maneuver and very slow to turn, so if a pilot does happen to see a rogue 30 meter wave up ahead he has very little he can do to avoid it. Everyone just dies.
Taking off in light wind is difficult, as wave direction is inconsistent. Taking off in heavy wind is a miserable, bumpy experience for the passangers. Sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I do think there might be something to GEVs, but it would require someone to invent a design that combined 1) 30+ meter flight height with 2) 3000 km range on one fuel tank. The ability to hop from bay to bay is critical to the design becoming practical.
Wouldn't most GEV be able to temporarily "jump" out of ground effect for emergencies like that, or at least wouldn't require much change to gain that capability? But that ability wouldn't really make a difference, not without solving all the other issues as well.
What I could imagine, as a narrow niche, is a short range regional plane designed to be good at utilizing ground effect on routes that are too short for the "ascend into thinner air" trick to work out and that happen to go over water. Not being seaplanes those wouldn't require sufficiently calm seas for aquatic start and landing. I think that this might be able to occupy an attractive sweet spot between the fuel economy of surface boats and the speed of aircraft in intra-archipelago traffic. Flying slow in ground effect could even be the missing link for creating a niche where electric flying is economically viable. Perhaps a "plug in hybrid" that goes purely electric on short hoops, stays purely electric on longer connections if the sea is sufficiently calm and that can spin up the RX if it is forced to fly the whole distance out of ground effect.
I think that the main economic issue with this concept is that fuel isn't that much of a cost factor in short distance flying, but I might be completely wrong with this.
Consider these vehicles can travel up to 500 km/h and operate very near to the ground, meaning
1) Vision-obscuring weather like fog or rain
2) A plethora of objects to smack into
3) Very low time to react due to high speed
This is why we generally avoid flying planes this low, unless forced to by circumstances. An example of such circumstances is found in military aviation, in which military aircraft fly very low to the earth to avoid detection (a strategy rendered somewhat less effective modernly due to the invention of light-weight Pulse-Doppler radar). In this case the danger from crashing the plane is judged less than the danger from enemy missiles.
GEVs take this already challenging and dangerous task, which the military only does because they are being shot at, and then make everything that much more difficult by having the vehicle control like a cow.
On the ocean? I'd say that not running into objects that raise high from an ocean would rank pretty low on the scale of control problems that are hard in 2020.
"up to 500 km/h" are military devices built for maximum speed at minimal distance from the surface. A short distance people mover aircraft that tries to trade speed for energy conservation would have very different numbers. And it would be far more nimble, by being able to quickly raise out of the ground effect level, than swimming ocean-surface vessels that are already quite capable of not hitting objects on the ocean (you'd definitely want to improve on the state of that art though).
The biggest issue with this concept, outside of the clearly problematic cost/market size ratio (because designing planes is never cheap) would surely be that an aircraft traveling in ground effect lacks the altitude energy store that allows conventional aircraft to deal surprisingly well with engine outages (or sensor issues) outside of short time windows during start and landing. You'd probably need to spend a lot of mass and effort on making the fuselage properly boatable in emergencies even if it's never intended to swim more than once.
And there's tons of traffic of all sorts across the North Sea. It's the perfect case for large short-range transport.
Ah!
Kidding aside, I think they are firmly in the awesome but impractical camp.
I'd love to see an alternative world where ekranoplans and zeppelins turned out to be the practical solutions.
NASA (or atleast someone affiliated with NASA) seems to think there's some potential! https://nari.arc.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/IF...
The last slide shares conclusions: "Commercial ground effect planes will lead to more fuel efficient trans-oceanic flights. • Cheaper flights. • More accessible. • Less pollution. • Revolutionize aviation design."
"http://www.seaphantom.com/pdf/MILITARY_ANALYSIS_WIG_AIRCRAFT...
> The Soviet Union was the only country to experiment with such a craft, and Russia abandoned the effort after the Cold War.
I think it could be argued that the Spruce Goose [1] was an early experiment with a hybrid Ground Effect Vehicle [2].
Since the Spruce Goose was never intended or designed to take advantage of ground-effect[0], it really can't unless you go with the approach that more or less every large plane is "an experiment in GEV".
[0] quite the opposite, GE is less pronounced with high wings, which is why the Lun uses mid-wings and the Orlyonok uses low-wings
This is a bit of a circular argument. How do you incorporate real-world empirical data in your design before you have a real-world prototype? The ground effects phenomena was known at the time and thought to be suited to large flying boats.
We are both speculating about undocumented intent but I'd be surprised if the designers were unaware of the potential efficiency gains.
You are making a positive assertion and providing no evidence whatsoever for it. My statement is that there is no evidence for for your assertion, and that the design of the spruce goose is evidence for the opposite of your assertion.