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
Because it’s not more efficient than flying at 30,000 feet where the air is much thinner. Also, skimming the surface of the water makes your entire flight vulnerable to hitting ships and birds; the risk is significantly less at the altitudes airliners cruise at since only a few birds like certain vultures and flamingo can fly 20K+ feet.
Have you seen the size of ocean swells?
But for ferries it is a possibility: [https://www.regentcraft.com/](https://www.regentcraft.com/)
For the ground effect to have substantial effect, you need to be close to the surface. Like, 20%-of-the-wingspan close to the surface. That’s 40 feet for a 747. A quick Google says ocean swells average 11 feet. That’s a quarter of the distance available. A couple waves meet in front of your flight path and you’re slamming an aluminum can into a brick wall at 500mph.
Lots of great answers here. I just wanted to plug the YouTube channel rctestflight. He’s built a lot of cool ground effect vehicles and I’ve learned a lot about them from watching his videos.
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).
The oceans arent flat and smooth all of the time so as soon as it gets rough things start to fall apart, with the added corrosiveness of salt water these crafts would have to get cleaned fairly often and would destroy engines, plowing into the ocean at 500 kts would be a bad time, passenger experience might also become an issue because flying over the ocean at 500 kts would be rather terrifying.
[Obligatory Mustard video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVdH_dYlVB8)
Oceanic storms are serious on another level. I wouldn’t want to fly under those, ever. Salt is an enormous problem for corrosion on planes that live near the water. Also, jets burn substantially less fuel at altitude due to thinner air.
This is a popular question on Reddit, are you a bot ? Low karma so probably. The ocean ain’t flat is a big reason
#the big one is speed at 30,000+ feet altitude is 550-600 mph,
so ‘efficiency’ yeah but also so your cross pacific flight didn’t take 33 hours at 240mph at sea level
and bad weather avoidance.
I believe the US military has a request out for prototypes for transocianatic transport planes.
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