Just looking at the turns it's making in the promotional video, it seems like the near side wingtip could easily make some pretty hard contact with the sea surface and cause all sorts of bother.
They were talking about running this in New Zealand between Wellington and Christchurch. The idea sounded batshit insane to begin with given how rough the waters are in the Cook Strait, which is also one of the reasons why there's no bridge connecting the North and South islands. I haven't heard anything about it in years and assume it will never get off the ground (if you pardon the pun).
The environmental issue with air travel is not high fuel consumption per passenger mile, but the number of miles per passenger. A coast to coast trip by car might burn just as much fuel as coast to coast by plane, but people simply wouldn't to that all that often in a lifetime.
That's for medium and long distance travel, short distance fuel consumption per passenger mile goes up dramatically.
OT: this is actually a point where I see a big, unserved gap in the market of climate-aware air travel. A feeder plane (from regional to intercontinental airport) dedicated to the market segment of "going by road or train might be roughly as fast, but I need to go to the airport and I can't risk missing my connection due to the unpredictable nature of ground travel". So you'd want a something the size of a CRJ or even just a dash-8, but ruthlessly optimized for fuel consumption. That would imply going slower (no issue at all when the time for bording etc greatly outweighs the time spent in the air!) which would imply moving the deep point in that induced vs parasitic drag diagram as far left as possible, which would imply going wild with wingspan, something sleek, carbon, like a performance glider, as wide as a 737 or beyond. One reason I've heard suggested for why this doesn't yet exist is that on those short hops (little time spent in the air), fuel cost is actually outweighed by crew cost so much that all the cost saving from lower fuel consumption would be eaten by getting less trips per crew-day. So it's an automaton problem in disguise? Or a regulatory problem?
I want the world to move to a system of very large and spacious and cool aircraft for major hub-to-hub travel, and then nice and comfortable high speed rail from hub to destination.
I’m tired of cramming into a narrowbody with no service. Let me fly on an engineering marvel like the A380 or 747 and then relax or work in a comfortable train seat.
What buffer for solving delays would you consider acceptable for that mode switch? Train schedules are inherently fragile because there's so much interdependence. Every tiny bit of the trip is locked into a signaling segment block time slot and one train causing a shakeup leads to wild butterfly wing effects fanning out in all directions. Rail networks in places that have more than just a trivial amount of service tend to run very close to saturation, even if they don't look like that at all. But you can't cram trains on a line like you can cram cars on a highway (or planes in an approach pattern), that's just not how safe signaling for wheel-on-rail works.
And no, I won't accept "but it works in Japan!" as a counter, because Japan does not really have anything resembling a train network. They have a number of lines going up and down one corridor, plus two appendices branching off to the west coast. Compared to that, even the French star of lines separated by metro rides appears complex.
The real answer is "wings clipped to tubes". Load the cheap tube at your leisure, drag it by semi under the waiting "wing". Clip, clip, vroom...
There was a great concept video of a train/bus station that did something similar, divorcing the loading of people into the tube from the attaching the tube to the train.
It allowed the train to keep going nearly 100% full speed, "magically" grabbing the tube loaded with passengers, and letting them pass into the moving portion (below) without stopping the train.
The passenger pickup capsule was then dropped off at the next station for the process to repeat.
Today you'd do it with electric buses(/trucks) that run on dedicated highways, or at least on dedicated lanes that are not only electrified (bus operates from a pair of pantigraphs except for that "last mile" part of the trip in regular roads or when there is some maintenance situation), but also exclusively run computer controlled in paceline formations. No physical connection (or perhaps physical connection for power crossfeed, to share pantograph wear, but no physical connection for push/pull), just a low latency, ack-heavy data link so that they would all accelerate and brake perfectly synchronized. Those buses (or trucks) would benefit from slipstream just like train cars do, but still be able to independently branch away or join at any exit. Of course the power bill would have to be shared by the whole formation, no need to rotate the lead (like a bicycle paceline would do) except perhaps in an unelectrified segment or during a power outage.
This would offer point to point connections, have all the efficiency benefits of trains except for the energy cost of rubber-on-tarmac relative to steel-on-steel, and would also offer greatly increased throughout compared to trains because a formation like that would retain almost all of the emergency breaking capability of trucks (and realistically speaking, have better capability than a queue of human-operated trucks that keep almost but not quite enough safety distance for human reaction). The only reason I see why this is not the obvious future is that it requires enormous critical mass to pick up. It probably needs electric trucks first, then electric trucks with pantograph on some main lines, and only then pantograph electric trucks joining into robotic pacelines at some even later point.
(the absolute end game state of course would be dedicated rights of way with a rail option useable to dual mode vehicles that could quickly drop on their road wheels not only for exiting formation but also for braking - note that breaking should not even exist in a formation like that, outside emergencies.
Hydrogen electric is little more than greenwashing before we have anything resembling a hydrogen surplus on the horizon. Energy density is always an issue in flying applications and it's well possible that a boring old turboprop burning efuels (made from that very same hydrogen surplus) would be the clear winner. Losses of the transformation pipeline vs losses from carrying the most impractical fuel type ever tried. Minimizing the energy requirement at the final conversion step is an important thing all too often missed in the frenzy of converting the path to get there.
Air resistance. Commercial aircraft fly as high as they reasonably can in order to reduce the amount of atmosphere they have to push through. The ground effect craft operates at sea level.
It's very small so the per seat usage is higher than a high density airliner. The comparison to a Cessna Caravan makes some sense, that's similar sized turbine powered.
I actually hope this becomes real vehicle, although it seems, and my comment perhaps amplified it, that there’s a sentiment reflecting doubts about the feasibility of the technology at all.
Maybe it works for large lakes and hot seas at all.
I would too. I believe the Sea Glider built by Regent Craft solves the take off in rough water component to some extent with hydrofoils. So you "taxi" on the hull in rough water up to a speed where you can get up on foil. Then with the reduced hull drag and clearance over (presumably low) rough water you can hit a higher speed when the wing creates lift, at which point the foils retract.
This seems like an optimal solution for takeoff, but I don't know how it lands in rough seas.
There used to be boat service between Toronto and Buffalo. That lake could be a good candidate as it connects two sizeable cities. Even if just used for goods transport? Heck, Toronto to Niagara or Hamilton could be a thing. Even better if there was good transport to get to one of the international airports on the last leg. Water shuttle from Toronto to Hamilton and some other quick transport to the airport there.
How reasonable would be it be to cross the Atlantic Ocean in such a aircraft ?
Would it be more efficient ? How much slower ? How would it fare in turbulent seas ?
It's more efficient than a low flying aircraft, due to reduced drag from ground effect. But it's not more efficient than a high flying airplane getting reduced drag from lower air density. So it works on short distances where the airplane would use a lot of fuel to get to high altitude, but on longer distances it wouldn't be more efficient.
It’s far less efficient crossing the Atlantic than modern jets. The advantage of something like this is it doesn’t need to gain altitude to become efficient so it’s decent for very shorter distances.
