Fuel costs, transatlantic, WIGE (Ekranoplans) and the future...
 

I rather hope that this thread will offer the boffins amongst us some exercise...

The Wing In Ground Effect (WIGE) or Ekranoplan has many benefits, but many drawbacks too. I'm interested, as an educated outsider (that is, I've never flown one), in whether it offers an efficient ocean crossing potential in terms of load carried versus fuel consumed, assuming typical WIGE speeds, and that all the problems could be ironed out.

The soviets couldn't make it work when fuel was not an issue so I wouldn't hold out much hope.

Well, the Soviets flew several designs, and I'm convinced that with modern lightweight materials, flight control augmentation, and the like, there is no fundamental problem. The Chinese are, it seems, building a new 20 metre vehicle, and elsewhere round the world smaller designs are seeing some development. The crucial thing seems to me that once in flight, the specific fuel consumption must be very favourable, must it not?

I've spent quite a bit of time low level over the ocean. Not quite low enough to be in ground effect but low enough to know you wouldn't want to take fare paying passengers there.

300 x 6 hours vomiting with eyeballs shaken out of skull = a lot of cleanup and no return pax.
:ok:

I wonder what the probability of hitting birds/ships/big waves would be on an extended ocean crossing? I'd have thought pretty high. Not to mention being right in all the weather.

I'm not sure about the efficiency side of it either, considering you can go twice as far at FL400 as you can at sea level in the same airframe. The gains from ground effect would have to be substantial (= very close to the surface) to better that...

Airships................

I'm not a physicist, but it seems to me that if you devote all your (on-board, stored, ie fuel) energy to thrust, and none to staying in the air, there's a gain somewhere.

So who needs to go to New York at 500Kts instead of at 120Kts?

Time for a book, film, meal and a zizz....perfect.

Modern materials and design, along with next generation thrust generation , could produce a superb, economic and safe vehicle.

Couldn't they.....?

Well, some of the eastern bloc folk I chatted to at SBAC seem to keep a flame alight...

However, it's clearly dead in the water here, if that's not an unfortunate turn of phrase...

The Do-X comes to mind.