If ground effect are so much more efficient why aren’t we using them for flights, from Europe to the US for example?
In: Engineering
One thing I’ve not seen mentioned is how much it would limit the routes and destinations. The UK for example has major airports inland and they’re not going to authorise very low flights to reach them. Building a plane that can ‘pop up’ to a more reasonable altitude for that final stretch will be a compromised design (worse payload, fuel economy, speed, etc) so there’s no real way round it aside from relocating major airports to the coast. Airlines aren’t going to want to invest in aircraft that are so limited on destinations and routes, such as having to go round countries rather than over them (so you can stay over water).
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