Ground effect vehicles, or ekranoplans, have the advantage of being more efficient than normal aircraft and faster than boats, but so far haven’t been developed beyond experimental prototypes. Fortunately, this doesn’t stop companies from trying, which has led to a collaboration between [ThinkFlight] and [rctestflight] to create a small-scale demonstrator for the Flying Ship Company.
The Flying Ship Company wants to use unmanned electric ekranoplans as high-speed marine cargo carriers that can use existing maritime infrastructure for loading and unloading. For the scale model, [rctestflight] was responsible for the electronics and software, while [ThinkFlight] built the airframe. As with his previous ekranoplan build, [ThinkFlight] designed it in XFLR5, cut the parts from foam using a CNC hot wire cutter (which we still want a better look at), and laminated it with Kevlar for strength. One of the challenges of ground effect vehicles is that the center of pressure will shift rearward as they leave a ground effect, causing them to pitch up. To maintain control when moving into and out of ground effect, these crafts often use a large vertical stabilizer high up on the tail, out of ground effect.
A major feature of this demonstrator is automatic altitude control using a LIDAR sensor mounted on the bottom. This was developed by [rctestflight] using a simple foam board ekranoplan and [Think Flighs]’s previous airframe, with some custom ..
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