I was strolling through my historic files on the interne and found this on one of my favorite sites heres a link.


http://www.enemyforces.com/aircraft.htm
then go to the navy section

Im thinking to myself,Have the lost their minds?Wasnt the Spruce Goose a good example already?

The 904 oralan class,one to remember,this experiment craft.

IIRC, the design actually showed a bit of promise, though it was way too expensive.

Wasn't that also called the Ekranoplan? Or was that a different plane?

Ekranoplan?Thats a differnet craft.

looks like a deformed Spruce Goose.

Ekranoplan is a general naming of such machines.

And all these things are from the Soviet past, so the subject name is not correct.
When Khruschov was at power he has supported designer R. Alekseev - the champion of hydrofoils and ekranoplans.
As soon as Brezhnev has taken over the power, the ekranoplans' era in the USSR was over...
http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/lun_ekranoplan.pl

this is a link with more pictures

It could carry a very large payload at high speed just above the waves over long distances. I would imaging it could be very effective, i suppose they thought the same thing about the hovercraft.

The Soviets had some very radical but impressive ideas. Just like the USA. The cold war turned out many interesting designs.

Right,war or military tension is the best way to improve technology is some cases.How ever it would be pretty sweet to see a Massive Orlan Class come screaming your way!

I saw that a while ago and thought about posting it but i figured, who would care about a soviet prototype?

It looks pretty damn cool and the basic concept was to make a plane that can fly right above the water so that it can travel farter with heavy payloads. I think there's some experimentation with that concept going on at this time.