Hovercraft
I’ve only ever ridden in a hovercraft once and that was in Hong Kong, when to celebrate the sale of Artemis to Lockheed, C and myself had a few days holiday in the colony.
We did the tourist trip to Canton, where you took a hovercraft up the Pearl River and then took a train back.
This is a Chinese video from YouTube of a hovercraft similar to the one on which we rode.
I asked Google, “What Killed The Hovercraft” and found two articles on the BBC.
The first was an emotional article, which was entitled Hovercraft Capsize Disaster Off Hampshire Coast Recalled 50 years On.
Just look what has happened in recent times to Boeing, after the problems with the 737 MAX.
The second is a more factual article, which is entitled What happened to passenger hovercraft?, where this is the sub-heading.
It’s 60 years since the British inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft using a cat food tin and a vacuum cleaner. Great things were promised for this mode of transport, but it never really caught on. Why?
I saw that demonstration.
These three paragraphs of the BBC article discuss the end of passenger hovercraft.
The cross-Channel service from Dover to Calais closed, external in 2000. The two vessels, the Princess Anne and the Princess Margaret, could carry only 52 cars. Larger ferries and cheaper-to-power catamarans, as well as the Channel Tunnel, proved too much competition. Routes in Japan and Sierra Leone have also since ceased.
“The problem militating against expansion has always been the noise for residents, who have to hear the hovercraft all day, 365 days a year,” says Warwick Jacobs, who runs the Hovercraft Museum, at Gosport, Hampshire. “The sound can travel quite a way, depending on the wind speed. We could have had hovercraft running on the Thames, for instance, but they’d have been too noisy.”
Recent models are quieter than their predecessors because of more efficient engines, while plans are in place to build electric-powered hovercraft, which will reduce the decibel count even further, Jacobs says.
Note.
- Over the years, I have been involved with anti-noise technology and even talked to McDonnell Douglas about it for one of their airliners.
- Electric propulsion and anti-noise technology are just two of those technologies that could transform the economics and unfriendly features of the hovercraft.
But what hovercraft need is a killer application in a high profile area, that gets engineers thinking.
The Anonymous Widower 