Soviet era sea monster resurfaces

BBC:

Was it a boat? Was it a plane? A bit of both in fact. The Ekranoplan was one of the more obscure products of the fight for technological supremacy in the Cold War. Nigel Paterson, who joined Top Gear presenter James May for a test "flight", recounts its secret history.

In September 1966 an American spy satellite flew over a Soviet naval base on the Caspian Sea and took a series of photographs. This being the height of the Cold War, the results created quite a stir among the American intelligence community, because they showed an object, more than 100m long with inexplicably stubby, square wings, quite unlike anything they had seen before.

Their first guess was that this was a conventional aeroplane, possibly a seaplane, but one that was incomplete and much bigger than any aircraft the US had.

But when the pictures were examined more closely, intelligence analysts calculated that, even if completed, it would actually fly really badly. This, coupled with the position of the engines, located well forward of the wing, made them realise what they were looking at was something entirely different. They had stumbled on one of the most top secret military projects of the Soviet era. The object was soon dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster.

What they were looking at was, in fact, an Ekranoplan; a wing in ground effect or WIG craft designed to fly at very high speed a few metres over the top of the sea. It sounds not unlike a hovercraft. But where a hovercraft floats on a skirt of air, the Ekranoplan sits clean above the surface and relies on a well known, if little understood aerodynamic phenomenon called "ground-effect".

In very simple terms the wing produces a dynamic cushion of air when it's close to the ground and the Ekranoplan effectively rides upon this. It's the same effect that pelicans use when flying low over the sea and it's a remarkably efficient way of flying, actually increasing lift by as much as 40%. All of which means the Ekranoplan was far more efficient than conventional aeroplanes.

But even more crucially, its ability to fly just a few feet above sea level lent it one huge military advantage - the fast and efficient Ekranoplan was stealthy, capable of carrying troops and armoured vehicles rapidly under the gaze of enemy radar.

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Of the 120 craft planned less than a handful were ever built or saw service and after the end of the Cold War the entire Soviet Ekranoplan project was abandoned - the surviving monsters were mothballed at the same Caspian naval base where they were first discovered by the American spy satellites.

Yet the technology behind the Ekranoplan continued to grip military minds in the West. In 1993 the US even sent its own team of analysts to assess the technology of the advanced Soviet Ekranoplan project with a view to developing their own for heavy sealift transports.

Today, a private company, ATTK, (Arctic Trade and Transport Company), is once again producing Ekranoplans in the very same shipyards where the first prototypes were designed, built and tested. But these civilian heirs to the Caspian Sea Monsters are altogether smaller and more pocket-sized affairs, designed to be used as personal craft or water taxis.

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There is more including several videos of the craft in action. I am a little surprised the Marines have not looked at this type of vehicle for projection force ashore.