Originally Posted by
Airbanda
The SEDAM N500:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N500_Naviplane
I travelled on the one which entered service in around May 1979 on a day trip to Boulogne. A slightly more comfortable trip than my one previous hovercraft experience from Calais to Ramsgate on a Hoverlloyd SRN4.
I first travelled on the (British-built) big hovercraft in 1976, with a mechanical engineer who I think had arranged the whole Paris travel arrangements around getting a trip in one. His key comment was how challenging getting directional control of such a craft must be. The French machine was not completed then, but notably its series of major issues focused on poor controllability, and a range of major structural and control surface modifications were made after its completion, and initial intermittent services, to try and get to grips with this, apparently never achieved, but something which the British machines had somehow managed.
Went that way again in 1982, the remaining French machine was dumped abandoned on the ramp at Boulogne, where (presumably in full sight of the terminal) it was later broken up.