“We cannot build our way out of traffic congestion” This statement has been made by the VDOT Commissioner and Virginia’s Secretary of Transportation.

What does this mean?

It means that according to some very experienced transportation experts that it is impossible to build enough roads.

Therefor, building more roads will never be the solution to bad traffic conditions.

If we can’t build our way out of gridlock what can we do?

We must come up with ways to move more people through more areas without requiring pavement or other established routes built for them.

Without some new form of technology being invented a solution to our transportation needs can not be achieved. That said, there are existing technologies available that do not require more futile infrastructure to be built.

Hovercraft lines could reduce the burden on the DC Metropolitan area greatly as well as improve the general attitude of the community.

Thousands of commuters could be removed from the roadways each day and also the deadly greenhouse gases that their vehicles add. No roads would have to be built which would free up huge amounts of budget to maintain the existing roadways and not waste more potentially profitable land with untaxable tarmac.

Hovercraft can not end the traffic woes of the Metropolitan area, but they will help a lot more than adding more lanes to I-95.

In another case of trying to answer potential questions about the use of hovercraft for commuter traffic in the Potomac region this article had hoped to look into the safety and accident history of hovercraft.

Doing a search in Google yielded no results. Assuming that the search phrases used were inaccurate, both CNN and the BBC were searched.

Both sites did have results for accidents involving hovercraft. With the exception of one person who fell off the side of a hovercraft on the BBC site all the rest of the results were hovercraft being used to rescue people involved in some other sort of accident.

This lack of findable news stories on a craft that has been used so extensively for 50 years is simply amazing.

A similar search for ferry accidents has 31 pages of results on the BBC site alone. It was clear that most of these were actual ferry accidents and not the craft being used for rescues.

The contrast is sharp.

This leaves a very important question: are hovercraft the safest means of transportation ever invented?

If not, they are certainly one of the safest.

With hovercraft companies advertising tens of millions of miles and tens of thousands of annual trips made with their individual hovercraft it is almost unbelievable that no one has even had one parked on their foot at some point.

Odds are though it is the very nature of the machine that makes them so safe. Hovercraft are large with wide bodies that are surrounded with basically a big rubber bumper and do not actually ride on the surface of the Earth. While they do technically fly they do so mere feet above the surface so engine failure would not involve a horrific crash to the ground. Hovercraft are also fairly basic technology as well which can only increase the level of safety and reliability.

Another factor probably is that the companies that operate hovercraft work very hard at keeping their standards of maintenance and operations very high.

What ever is responsible for their extremely impressive safety record, there is no doubt that hovercraft are beyond safe.

As you watch this video of a hovercraft doing its job, please notice a few things.

First off, while hovercraft will never be considered a stealthy vehicle, notice that they really are only about as loud as a city bus.

Next, notice the people actually standing behind the main propellers on the bridge. Obviously they do not produce as much propeller wash as would be expected.

While the weather is not too bad in this video, these are not exactly ideal boating conditions for most craft. Looks like what would be considered “light to moderate chop” which is usually enough to turn your average person quite green. However, the ride on the hovercraft itself seems relatively smooth. Specially when you notice just how fast the hovercraft is traveling across that not so calm water.

Finally, do actually take the time to notice just how fast that hovercraft is actually traveling. A ferry just can not compete for speed and ride smoothness.

While we are discussing ferries, for those of you who have actually ridden on one, you will notice that the sound inside the hovercraft is pretty much the same as the sound while riding a conventional ferry.

They really aren’t that loud.

There is no denying that hovercraft are popular in the imagination of many people. From Joss Whedon’s insistence that there is no point to making a Sci-Fi movie like Serenity without a hovercraft to George Lucas’ repeated use of the craft and their variants in his Star Wars Universe they have long been the staple of science fiction.

What makes this notable is they aren’t exactly a modern idea. The original idea is older than the United States and hovercraft have been in practical use for about 50 years at this point. Such an old and established idea to be regularly thought of in terms of Sci-Fi.

The idea of traveling on a cushion of air just seems so fanciful. It seems so impossible to travel easily and effortlessly from water to land and back again. And yet, the reality is hovercraft can and do.

Unlike most things normally considered to be in the realm of Sci-Fi like space ships and such, hovercraft are both practical and safe.

The reason they are exciting to people probably has a lot to do with the pure audacity of a machine that has the power to lift itself up off the ground and float on air and then to travel at a high rate of speed without caring what is actually under it. Sheer power is always exciting to humans.

Usually, when something has this kind of power there is a serious drawback to it. Take for instance the SST Concorde. Even before it was determined after decades of use that they weren’t safe, they were plagued with all sorts of restrictions due to their impact on the environment. Not minor restrictions either, being forbidden from flying over the continental US is a major setback.

Hovercraft for all their impressive power and ability to traverse all kinds of terrain effortlessly have never faced being banned from use anywhere due to having nasty side effects.

Hovercraft are just *that* cool.

Why would hovercraft be ideal for use on the Potomac?

There are many reasons why hovercraft would be perfect for use on the Potomac river. This article will briefly cover a few of them but it is not an exhaustive piece.

Obviously, the Potomac waterways are both an environmentally fragile and abused area. Conventional watercraft have too many negatively impacting side effects to be allowed to go the places that hovercraft can.

In order for ferries to be used in the areas that WaterLine Metro is certain adverse things would be required.

Channels would have to be dredged. This would be catastrophic to the marine environment alone. Shallow water would no longer be shallow and other wetland would no longer be wet because the dredged matter has to be put somewhere.

Piers would need to be made at each end. This seems fairly innocuous at first glance, unless a person has actually seen a pier and the generally destructive impact they have on a sensitive area.

Then, there are the actual ferries.

Conventional marine engines are designed to take water in from the environment and use them for cooling and put the water back into the environment. Even in a brand new and perfectly clean engine, this means raising the temperature of the water. As our recent learning of global warming hazards have taught us, even a mild increase in temperature can have dramatic effects on an area.

With an older engine, this gets exacerbated by oils and other toxins leaking into the cooling water. On top of this, because the hull of a conventional water craft is in the water, leaks of toxins get into the water from other sources than only the coolant system.

The exhaust gases from conventional marine engines also directly ported into the water. This also raises the ambient temperature of the water as well as pumping nasty greenhouse gases directly into the water.

At this point, it is also to be pointed out that marine vehicles are not held to the same level of emission standards that our personal land craft are held to. They mostly use what is called a 2 stroke (or cycle) internal combustion engine which has oil mixed in with the gas to lubricate the internal workings of the engines. 2 stroke engines are simply put, dirty nasty things because that oil does not burn. Instead the oil passes directly out through the exhaust. This means it is pumped into the water.

If that wasn’t enough, in order for any conventional watercraft to be efficient, its’ hull must be kept clean of barnacles and other growths. The common way to do this is by applying a special paint to the below waterline of the hull. This paint doesn’t exactly bond with the hull completely because the way it works is the barnacles and such will adhere to it and then as the boat travels through the water the paint slowly peels off, thus removing the barnacle growth as it appears. This paint is commonly made of copper. Obviously this means that every time a boat goes anywhere it is leaving a slight trail of copper behind it as well as the other noxious chemicals. Admittedly, this is a small amount of copper with each trip the boat makes, but the nature of ferries is lots of repeated trips.

As well as the direct trail of toxins and temperature changing that ferries leave behind them, they also leave a wake. A rather large wake due to the size and mass of the hull displacing the water as it travels. Even a small boat can have catastrophic results on wetland areas with their wake. Traveling slow only minimizes this effect, it does not eliminate it. Specially now with a craft that displaces a huge amount of water as it moves.

Another very real consideration with ferries is that they require relatively calm water to travel through, obviously. In Winter, ice tends to shut them down completely. At other times of year even minor storms can stop their travel or worse yet, suddenly appear and cause adverse things like capsizing to occur.

To contrast this, we have hovercraft.

A hovercraft requires no piers, docks or channels. Hovercraft also have no parts that even touch the water, let alone pump chemicals into it. Hovercraft do not care what is under them. This means they work over sand, mud, water, ice and even larger storm surge waves. The hovercraft leave virtually no wake whether they are standing still or traveling over 100 MPH.

Hovercraft can operate 12 months out of the year and in all but the most inclement weather. This has been proven for decades over arguably some of the roughest and most fickle waterways. Usually hovercraft are used where other vehicles just can not go.

The shortened list provided here on the bad effects of slow moving and generally unsafe ferries is rapidly made moot by comparing ferries to hovercraft.

When the sensitive Potomac waterways are added into the equation it quickly becomes obvious that hovercraft are the only real choice of rapidly moving people through this environment.

Do you want the Potomac further destroyed by man’s impact or do you want it to be minimally impacted as we use it for the better?

• New Heavy Rail Dulles Metrorail Extension
  23 mile system
  7 Stations – 60,000 passengers/ day

  Total Cost: $5 Billion
  Cost per mile: $200 Million

• New Monorail (for Dulles type extension)
  23 mile system
  7 Stations – 60,000 passengers/ day

  Total Cost: $5 Billion
  Cost per mile: $200 Million

• New HOT lanes on I-95
  70 mile system for 120,000 cars/day

  Total Cost: $1 Billion
  Cost per mile: $15 Millon

• Water Line Metro
  45 mile system on 2 sides of Potomac
  (90-mile system) 20 downstream stations –
  3 Metrorail Transfer Stations 120,000 riders/day

  Total Cost: $400 million
  Cost per mile: $4.5 million

IF the politicians are stewards of public moneys, THEN high speed commuter hovercraft system wins hands down.

The first known concept for a vehicle that could be called a hovercraft was in 1716. This vehicle never made it past the concept stage since the designer, Swedish Emanuel Swedenborg, used a man powered, oar driven system for propulsion. Obviously, this idea just could not produce enough power to lift the craft.

In the 1870’s British Sir John Isaac Thornycroft actually built a number of test models and filed some patents on his ground effect vehicles. Still, the other needed technologies were too primative so no practical use was found for his works.

In 1952, the British again get credit for a patent with Christopher Cockerell’s work with air lubricated hull. Cockerell used a vacuum cleaner motor to make his small personal craft actually work. He patented this as the “hovercraft principle” and built test craft to prove this wasn’t just theory.

His work was so good that the British government classified his work as secret and restricted because it was deemed valuable for military purposes.

Fortunately, the British have always been competitive and wanted to keep the lead in development so they took his designs in 1958 and paid for an experimental vehicle to be built. The SR-N1 was built and launched in 1959 and made a crossing of the English Channel from France to England on the anniversary of Bleriot’s first Cross Channel Flight.

Sir Christopher was knighted in 1969 for his services to British Engineering and he coined the term “hovercraft” to describe his invention.

The first passenger hovercraft was the Vickers VA-3, which in 1961 carried passengers regularly along the North Wales Coast from Wallasey to Rhyl.

From here on the rest, as is said, is history.

By 1968 hovercraft were carrying cars across the temperamental and dangerous English Channel. Eventually, the hovercraft were able to carry well over 400 passengers and 60 cars at speeds near 100 MPH. The cross channel use ended in 2000 when it became cheaper to use the Chunnel to traverse the Channel. But, with increased congestion in the Chunnel, plans are afoot for new cross channel effort.

Hovercraft are still used in the U.K. as daily transportation to and from the Isle of Wight.

Hovercraft are widely used around the world to go where no other vehicle can. They are safe and able to traverse any form of mostly level terrain. The US government uses them for both military and US Postal services.

Hovercraft were even used to bring some of the first troops to land in Iraq.

In 50 years of actual use, hovercraft have left the realm of being only large scale people movers and equipment carriers to also being small personal ATV craft for pleasure and performance.

In trying to create objective articles about hovercraft, there is an extensive use of Google to find common issues for and against the use of the craft. Searching on such phrases as residential complaints about hovercraft produces not a single result. Various conjugations of that phrase or similar produces the same.

Keep in mind, there are complaints to be found about hovercraft, but they are seemingly exclusive to the do it yourself hovercraft kits.

This in itself is an impressive feat! Hovercraft have been used for over 30 years now commercially and there are no complaints easily findable.

Any other public transportation method has uncountable complaints due to the impact the vehicles have. Anyone stuck behind a bus in traffic has a complaint about them. Generally, buses are ponderous and produce all sorts of noxious fumes and generally disrupt the flow of traffic. Airports get a myriad of complaints for all sorts of real and niggly reasons.

Other than complaints on kit built personal hovercraft there are some noise related complaints that can be found about PERSONAL hovercraft. Usually, these are either inexpensive models or racing models or personal craft.

Modern mass transit hovercraft are about as loud as a bus. Considering that hovercraft are larger than a bus, use propellers for propulsion, carry more passengers and cargo than a bus and can go virtually anywhere, this is very impressive.

Birds do not even really mind hovercraft.

Again, racing hovercraft can be very loud, but anyone who has seen a car race knows that their is a massive difference between a built for speed automobile and the common personal use vehicle. Racing vehicles just don’t care about anything but raw horsepower.

According to Google, hovercraft are probably the least annoying of all methods of bulk people moving. Contrary to what might be assumed.

For any craft to operate in an economical fashion, it’s resistance to motion, or drag, must be kept down. With an automobile, this means having good tires that are properly inflated. With a boat or ship, this means having a good hull design and keeping it clean of growth. With trains, this means level and clear tracks to run on.

With a hovercraft, this means having a nice cushion of air to ride on.

That cushion of air is what makes the hovercraft actually the best choice for environmentally fragile areas. There is no rail, road or shipping channel that must permanently scar the environment and there is no wake from a hull cutting through the water.

Running a stretch of highway or rail would be totally devastating to a fragile ecosystem like most sounds and back water areas. Either of these things are often totally devastating to an ecological system like a sound or a marsh, as well as being financially ludicrous to achieve. Using boats as transportation is also as potentially devastating to an area due to the fact that the vessel has a hull that must usually go under the water requiring dredging of waterways and then the adverse effect of wakes causing changing water levels and erosion. Anyone familiar with boating knows what a “no wake zone” is and why it is there. Shore dwelling animals do not do well when their environment gets flooded and washed away by a boat’s wake.

Because a hovercraft rides on air, not water (or land) it can safely travel through some very environmentally fragile areas with minimal impact. Sure, the animals may not like a hovercraft going directly over head, but that is not in the same arena as a boat which will effect areas many thousands of yards away from their actual path of travel. A hovercraft only effects what is directly under it and then only with a wash of air. This makes it easier to have a negligible impact on an environment by making sure not to pilot the hovercraft directly over an estuary or other type breeding ground.

To put things into contrast, a human standing still exerts about 3 pounds of pressure per square inch, when walking this can go as high as 25 pounds per square inch. The average hovercraft exerts about 0.33 pounds per square inch on the surface, irregardless of whether it is standing still or traveling at full speed. There are birds that produce more pressure per square inch.

Another point to consider in an environmental impact of wetlands is the noise that is produced, both above the surface of the water as well as below. Because a hovercraft has no parts that go under water, there is no direct sound conduction into the water. There is no big noise to scare the fish. The above surface noise is far less than a train and about the same levels as a truck or a bus. Not only is this an obvious statement but it has also been tested by independent scientific methods. As for the above surface level noise, technology has come a long way in making the propeller blades work as efficiently as possible and keeping the noise down. Most of this noise is actually aimed behind the craft due to the nature of how propellers work.

A side benefit of hovercraft in an ecologically sensitive area is that by design necessity the hull of a hovercraft is a sealed unit. This means that should the engines have a leak of some sort, the leak would not escape the craft and “drip” into the environment. There is also no exhaust outlet below the surface like with most conventional water craft. This means that there are no emissions gases being pumped into the water and no change in water temperature.

Another factor with hovercraft is that the engines are very efficient and “clean” due to the nature of the vehicle. Hovercraft tend to use 4 stroke engines where as many conventional marine vehicles use the “dirtier” 2 stroke type of combustion. Conceivably, hovercraft could also use totally “green” propulsion methods and increase their fuel efficiency immeasurable.

As with dredging shipping channels, most marine vessels also require other environmentally impacting modifications to an area, for example: a dock. A hovercraft has not need for any formal docking area. In truth, the only thing a hovercraft needs is the ability for people to get to the craft. A hovercraft could effortlessly travel from open water over grass marsh and pull right on to an existing parking area. This would allow the passengers to embark/disembark without making ANY changes to an environment.

A couple of recent studies in the United Kingdom and Australia (where hovercraft have been used extensively for over 30 years) bear out the above. They found that the hovercraft caused NO damage to sea grasses or invertebrates in inter-tidal areas and that bird life rabidly adjusted to the hovercraft’s presence in their environment.

Hovercraft are without a doubt the most environmentally friendly way for humans to traverse fragile ecosystems.

This isn’t theory, but fact with hard evidence as has been briefly outlined here.

Some points about environmental impact from hovercrafts:

no trace - environmental concerns
By applying the third generation hovercraft technology, in environmental sensitive regions, gain significant environmental benefits.

A conventional boat designed to carry 10-15 tons at 40 knots would require propulsion by diesel engines of 6000 to 10000 Hp.

- Depending on the application, some crafts achieve the same carrying capacity and speed by flying 1,5-2 meters above the surface of the sea, thus reducing surface friction that allows twin or four diesel engines propulsion of 3000 hp. The benefits can be summarized as following:

No Submarine Impact
Transference of propeller noise to marine life does not occur and does not have a negative impact on the submarine life.
Flora, fauna, seabed sediments and fish spawn are protected due to the total absence of any underwater turbulence or stern gear.

No Discharge
There is no discharge of diesel fuel, lubrication oil, gasoline or hot exhaust gases into the water.

No Wash
Some hovercrafts generate almost zero wash. Beach-, jetty-, harbor construction erosion is avoided. Erosion is a major problem caused by conventional ferries and pleasure boats

Reduction of Noise
Due to the past ten years development of propeller ducts with close propeller tip clearance, some Hovercrafts are not noisier than equivalent twin engine conventional high speed boats with inboard or outboard propulsions. Independent noise tests has been carried out both in England and in Sweden recording acceptable levels.

No toxic antifouling
The hovercraft does not need any toxic antifouling paint to keep the bottom clean from vegetation. Toxic bottom paint has become serious problems in the most sensitive areas.