How manoeuvrable is an ekranoplan?

As someone who’s enjoyed both the Red Bull Air Race contest and Formula 1, I’m thinking that watching a race between ekranoplans might be quite fun. Sort of the F1 of power boat racing. But they’d have to be manoeuvrable, able to go around corners easily. And that I cannot seem to find.

So ejumakate me. :smiley:

I thought they went extinct when faster and more nimble mammals evolved.

But seriously, thanks for helping me learn a new word. They look neat.

I assume you mean ground-effect planes in general? This one looks reasonably maneuverable, but the wingtip is hitting the water during tight turns:

i suspect he’s asking about the ekranoplans that look like airplanes with partial amputations. These were seriously proposed (and to some drgree used) for rapid transportation of people and supplies across large lakes, and their wings sit much higher than the ground effect machine in your video. You’d expect that the limitation wasn’t how far they could tip before the wings hit the water, but how far until they became unstable.

Ekranoplan basically means a ground effect boat-plane kinda thing. If you are talking about something like a Lun-class ekranoplan (which is typical when people mention this sort of thing), then they aren’t very maneuverable at all.

From here:

I wouldn’t describe something that can’t turn to avoid obstacles as being maneuverable.

Smaller ekranoplans would be much more maneuverable.

I wasn’t really thinking of the Caspian Sea Monster; a race of those would be rather boring.