The current plane's wingspan is 65 feet, which probably means it flies about 32 feet (half a wingspan) off the water. Rogue waves can easily be that high in mild weather, and hitting even a small amount of water at 200 mph (claimed cruise speed) is bad.
Lots of sea birds too, presumably, at that altitude.
It's small compared to regular flight, but it's far more efficient than a regular boat hull pushing the water. A lot of that efficiency is achieved in hydrofoil mode, but lifting into ground effect mode should be even more efficient than hydrofoil (albeit as you say at some loss of stability).
There are already several electric hydrofoil pleasure boats available that have remarkable range, i.e. Navier and Candela.
This feels like something that an automated system could pretty easily detect, up to the range of visibility, and raise the seaplane up if this happens.
Further, this is an inter-island route. Adding dedicated monitoring seems imminently doable.
Yes, this is a concern. No, it's not hard to deal with.
You're probably right. But it also makes me think this might be a fantastically unlikely problem. I wonder where we'd get data on the likeliness of rogue waves of what size around Hawaii. It also stirs wondermemt about wavelength/periodicity of wave systems.
Not necessarily, especially around costal islands in the ocean
The confluence of wind and tide around islands causes unpredictable ant violent sea conditions
Costal sailors know this
the certification of the craft as a ship instead of a plane. I think it'd be very easy to build today a flying boat like the ones from 30s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_314_Clipper), yet certification cost of it makes it unfeasible as a business endeavor.
In general, if I remember correctly, the cheap inter-island transportation isn't really wanted there as it is expected to bring homeless/etc. to the otherwise affluent islands.
There’s already dirt cheap inter-island transport, it’s just slow. A homeless guy doesn’t care if the ferry takes 2 hours instead of 30 minutes when the ticket is $40.
>There’s already dirt cheap inter-island transport
that is the point that there is no such transport.