Brittany Ferries are looking to go green and fast with battery powered ferries that go at up to 180mph (~300kph).

https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/brittany-ferries-unveils-flying-ferry-5532568?fbclid=IwAR3hkCW2X_F2rJxoZAFNshiRGTIokBFc0 2rNi6ph6fMSFWViCwoVX_zBY-s

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

The first time I crossed the Channel with a car we flew - Silver City Airways ran Bristol Freighters which took 2 or 3 cars (depending on their size) and 12 passengers. About a 15 minute flight as I recall.

Back to the future...

I remember watching one of the Bristols unloading at le Touquet airport some time about 1963-64. Cars were a lot smaller and lighter then.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

It's an Ekranoplan. What the CIA called the Caspian sea monster in the 1970's



Fly by wire will have solved the problem that this is an aircraft permanently in "coffin corner" between its stall speed and maximum ceiling, but I see three remaining problems. The energy to fly at 30 feet means noise. You can deal with engine noise but the aerodynamics are no glider. It will have to be seaworthy in case weather gets the better of the crew or mechanical defect. This isn't a 1960's government vanity project like the hovercraft so I bet they go to town on elven safety. This will make it heavy so you wonder if the payload will be economical? The turning circle is miles unless you land. Are the authorities going to allow a passenger carrying missile in the world's busiest shipping lane?

It's an interesting project, I wish them luck.

Andy

I don’t see it being a problem crossing from the UK to Roscoff and Cherbourg - going across from Dover to Calais is somewhat different. As long as they have the height to see a few miles ahead it should not be an issue - at sea level you can see an object 1m above the sea from a distance of 3.6km. Realistically the height of the radar is going to be at least 10m above sea level which gives a range of 11.3km - plenty of time to adjust course - around 2 minutes and 20 seconds at 180mph.

There are some really obscure websites out there - http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm - and this has got to be one of them.

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You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

The problems here being:

1) The vehicle literally does not exist, it's a computer rendering, and if it doesn't exist as a working prototype in 2021, then it sure as hell is not starting passenger operations in 2028.

2) If they build it, especially as a battery-powered model, then it will almost certainly not have the payload for cars or bikes - much like the little hydrofoil that used to run a passenger service between the south of Sakhalin and the northern tip of Japan.

3) Who the hell is going to pay a premium to quickly fly as a passenger between two coastal ports and then have to spend 3x the flight time in border queues on either side of the channel?

People always post the photo of the Lun above - but that was a prototype of a warplane, a fast missile platform designed to kill US aircraft carriers by coming in under the radar, launching a barrage of cruise missiles from a standoff distance of the carrier's battlegroup, and GTFOing before the enemy CAP notices. Even for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, it turned out to be economically unviable - unlike the Orlyonok, a later heavy cargo model designed as a fast landing craft, which actually was in service with the Soviet Navy for a minute.



And then of course it turned out that there was no real use for them.

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I live on one side of (what used to be) a very busy ferry route, Tallinn to Helsinki, millions of passengers a year, hourly departures by multiple operators. Every attempt to run anything other than a massive car-and-truck ferry has failed miserably, including helicopters, passenger-only hydrofoils, and fast CATs that took vehicles. If you can't stuff your hold full of lorries, you can't make the economics work.