What's nice about the German Slider we looked at yesterday is that the work of its pioneer has been taken forward by his son, with modern means reviving an aircraft that needed a leg up in order to realise commercial returns.
A wholly new venture in ground-effect is the Viceroy aircraft from Regent, designed to finally realise the potential returns from flight over water at competitive cost and much reduced environmental impact.
The reason water has been underused by aircraft is two-fold, the adverse affects of saline water on alloy aircraft, beside the surplus of concrete runways left after WW2 that are still used today in the form of any number of international airports.
Said airports are, like much else however, a blight on the landscape and one of the planning committee that looked at the feasibility of turning a US base into Stansted later came to regret its desecration of an otherwise bucolic rural landscape in Essex.
Nonetheless we needed means by which we could desecrate the larger world by way of low-cost flights that wrote off the cost to the atmosphere... and why not, as most of us won't be here to bear the consequences? But ground-effect aircraft like these need little by way of the built environment while suffering altogether less from the effects of sea-water on corrosion.
A criticism of eVTOLs is that they represent simply another means by which the rich can move around more quickly, as they do in helicopters currently from one side of Rio to the other. It's true of high-speed rail efforts in the UK, which would principally serve the rich by either extending the capitol's suburbs to greener landscapes, else allowing them to attend football matches in person in the North of England for just the day... which was at least the plan.
What Regent are doing is altogether more credible as a universal means of moving coastal communities around at a reasonable cost, however, and they have done so by combining three realms of travel for the very first time.
Conventionally seaplanes have literally had difficulty getting off the ground (or sea) due to the disproportionate drag produced when travelling fast on water. The use of hydrofoils mitigates this obstacle, allowing for a seamless transition between travel on a displacement hull to elevation on hydrofoils and from thence into flight within ground-effect... and vice-versa.
As with ground-effect efforts of the past, obstacles to hydrofoils have been largely overcome by electrification. Firstly, stabilising the ride height has been addressed by computing power. Secondly, the chances of collisions with flotsam and jetsam that led to high maintenance costs and disruption in the past is alleviated: aircraft like this using them principally as a means of launch and recovery.
