in 1967 whilst the US sees first spy
satellite Corona was busy photographing
the Soviet Union something unusual was
spotted it looked like a massive plane
but its wings were too short it also
sported the Soviet Navy flag on its
fuselage so what was it maybe an
unidentified aircraft or some new design
of amphibious vehicle this Leviathan was
in fact the ekranoplan a new class of
what is now known as a ground effect
vehicle and that uses a phenomenon that
occurs when a wing is traveling close to
the ground
the ekranoplan was the brainchild of
Rotta slave Alexia
a Russian designer who began his career
working on high-speed Hydra files
throughout the 1950s he developed a
number of successful ships rising to
lead the central hydrofoil design bureau
in the city of Gorky on the river Volga
but still his first speed led him to his
most famous idea to lift the hydrofoils
fins out of water entirely alekseyev's
innovation was to use this ground effect
phenomena and he envisioned a huge
vehicle with a capacity of a ship but
the speed of an aircraft the ground
effect works when a wing is provided
with extra lift by the cushion of
trapped air between the surface below
and the wing itself and enables a
combination of greater aircraft weight
for less power and or greater fuel
efficiency however his designs would
cost a lot of money to build a tough
sell when the resources were thinly
spread in Soviet Russia however if a
military use for the ekranoplan could be
found then the project's models could be
scaled up the Gorky engineers drew up
plans for a prototype ekranoplan that
would be large enough to transport
hundreds of troops or bring a battery of
missiles to within range of enemy
territory the benefits for the Navy were
obvious the ekranoplan would travel at
high speed just above the surface of a
sea but below enemy radar it would also
be immune to minds torpedoes and
anti-submarine Nets in 1960 alexia
attended a communist party meeting where
was in attendance and immediately
captured the imagination of the Soviet
premier Khrushchev saw via Krannert plan
as a way to face up to America's mighty
aircraft carriers and championed
alekseyev's design bureau Khrushchev
would later boast that the USSR had
boats that could jump over bridges but
of course everyone assumed he was just
joking at a time in the early 1960s
everything about the ekranoplan
including its name was classified the
project was known as steamboat which
must have seemed appropriate as the
prototype took shape a round of both
like hull the first working model was
known as km or cobbled macit meaning
simply prototype ship although vered km
was hidden in wooden casings and only
moved at night the strange shape were
soon spotted in images on the American
Corona reconnaissance satellite the
defense agency puzzled over what it
could be the squat wings didn't seem
capable of lifting an aircraft of that
size in fact they were so concerned as
to what it might be the CIA you were
even going to use a special
remote-controlled drone project called a
Quillin that originally had been
developed to spy on the Chinese nuclear
program but its unreliability forced
them to abandon the idea because of the
letters km painted on its back they gave
it the nickname caspian monster but it
soon became commonly known as their
caspian sea monster to those in the West
on October the 16th 1966 km was prepared
for its maiden flight
alexia himself was on board against all
the usual rules that dictated that
designers should not ride on test
vehicles the giant ekranoplan lifted
from the waves and accelerated to four
hundred kilometers an hour with a power
of his eight huge turbojet engines at
the front and two more area then the
roar of its engines quietened and the km
cruised just as alexei f had claimed the
eight front engines not only provided
most of a forward thrust
their exhaust was also angled down to
direct air
under the short wings to give him an
extra cushion of air to ride on during
the 50-minute flight the fuselage flexed
and rolled an issue which would later be
rectified by strengthening the body
panels but the ekranoplan worked they
had proved that their seamonster could
fly however the political tides of a
Soviet Union were about to turn
Khrushchev was ejected from office in
1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev who
was deeply skeptical of the oversized
concepts like km alexei f and his
engineering team went to Brezhnev to
present their ideas directly but the
premier was unimpressed at the end of a
presentation his only comment was about
the lunch under the new administration
alekseyev's dream of a fleet of giant
ekranoplans began to fade however his
central hydrofoil design bureau was
given to go ahead to build a smaller
transport vehicle based on the same
technology called the awliya knock or
baby eagle the first military ekranoplan
was still a huge beast 80% as long as a
boeing 747 jet and able to move a
hundred and forty Marines or two fully
loaded armored personnel carrier
vehicles alekseyev's design bureau also
developed another military ekranoplan
this time an aircraft carrier killer
called a lung which means harrier in
english at 280 tons and 74 metres long
lund was equipped with six mosquito
rocket launchers along its dorsal edge
which could engage an enemy ship from 90
kilometers away
however the ekranoplan required
considerable skill to operate and keep
at his optimal height of 20 meters above
the water pilots also reported fatigue
from constantly scanning the oncoming
waves or small boats in 1975 during a
test flight for one of the awliya not
vehicles a tale of rear-engine broke off
in rough seas
luckily Alexei F was on board
and took control from a pilot quickly
engaging the remaining engines to land
the crippled ekranoplan on the shore
although he'd save the crew the soviet
military chiefs blamed alexia for the
accident and removed him as a chief
designer of the bureau alekseyev's
independent character had put him at
odds with the soviet establishment and
within years he was demoted again and
eventually sidelined
alexia withdrew from his research and
spent long days sailing and battling
storms in an element will struggle with
the sea in his final years he
despairingly told his daughter i haven't
achieved what I wanted to do in 1980 age
63 he died of injuries he received in an
accident whilst testing a new ekranoplan
which was to be shown at the 1980 Moscow
Olympics that year would also see
alekseyev's greatest invention laid to
rest on December 15th the km prototype
by this time in poor condition launched
for a test flight the inexperienced
pilot reportedly attempted a take-off
without engaging full power and the sea
monster crashed sinking in 20 meters of
water over over giant tail and
stabilizer protruded above a water for a
time the first chronic plane was simply
too massive to be recovered and it
remains in the Caspian Sea to this day
lurking just beneath the waves in 1984
one of your Crenna plans main supporters
the Minister of Defence Dmitriy Ustinov
died and soon after funding was removed
from a project in 1991 the Soviet Union
collapsed and the remaini ekranoplans
were abandoned the massive lung India
pink apiece work is still there today
whilst one of the last awliya knox was
moved to a russian navy museum in moscow
all over soviets and later of russians
were the main proponents of the ground
effect vehicles other countries
including South Korea China and Germany
have all built their own versions in
varying sizes though nothing has been on
the scale of the original ekranoplans
in 2002 Boeing in the u.s. unveiled a
monster-sized design called the Pelican
which would have been the biggest plane
ever built the length of a football
field with a wingspan of a hundred and
52 meters and capable of carrying 1,400
tons of cargo it would fly at 20,000
feet over land but over open oceans it
would fly just 20 feet above waves and
used for ground effect to make it more
efficient however since its unveiling
nothing more has been heard of a pelican
so what do you think of your Krannert
plans a possible future transport system
or technological dead-end let me know
what you think in the comments I would
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