How is this a first in any way? Ground effect vehicles have been a thing for decades.
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WTF. It's not the first by any means. The USSR had an insanely massive one that was so fucking cool looking and pointless. There were others.
Yeah I know of at least one company in the US already planning on doing this with passenger service.
The headline is bogus clickbait.
Yeah but you can't make Sino Number #1 propaganda if you include the others.
Arguably the Spruce Goose was an (unintentional) ground effect vehicle because its one flight didn't leave the ground affect regime.
But the USSR made tons of cool ground effect vehicles.
Completely different from all the other ground effect vehicles that have been flown over water in the many decades before, which were nothing like that at all.
Ground effect vehicle? What's that?
Ground effect vehicles are basically airplanes that are forced to fly really, really low. They take off from water and cruise just a few meters above the surface. At that altitude, the air gets compressed between the wing and the ground or water, which creates a huge cushion of extra lift. This lets the vehicle carry way more weight than a normal plane of the same size and power, making it incredibly efficient for hauling cargo over water. The trick is that it only works over flat surfaces like oceans or lakes, and the piloting can be tricky because you're skimming the waves at high speed without actually being able to climb to a higher altitude. It's a neat piece of engineering that trades operational flexibility for raw lifting power.
That looks something Scrooge McDuck would fly on late 80's to early 2000's comics.
@yogthos I'm not sure is the first: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-clas…
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