I saw an old British movie on TV recently in which one of the characters took a hovercraft from Dover to Calais, and I thought “What a cool way to travel!”
Of course, it turns out that the hover-ferry service between the UK and France was discontinued in 2000 and (apparently something to do with competition from the Chunnel making it unprofitable), which is a shame.
But a bit more searching around on Wiki shows that the Cross-Channel and Cross-Solent service (which is still going) are about the only notable commercially successful uses of hovercraft. They seem like a pretty useful craft (being able to operate on land and water), so what’s kept them from being a bigger success? High operating costs?
If the military still uses some hovercraft, it means there is still some advantage to using them. How it translates into civilian travel I have no idea.
Its an interesting question, though. What did keep them from becoming a preferable/more mass produced form of water travel? Cost only?
It seemed fairly cool in theory but in practise was fairly noisy, and vibrated a lot from memory. The Chunnel made it fairly obsolete. They tend to be fairly weather sensitive from memory, and shorter range. So the time savings in practise are fairly minimal (as in 40 minutes vs 90 minutes kind of thing), and they were expensive to run.
There just arent many niches for them as far as large scale hovercraft go.
I dunno about water, but any land vehicle that rides on a cushion of air is going to have some serious problems with steering and braking. It’s like driving an air-hockey puck. Also has the fuel consumption of a helicopter. More here.
The fuel costs to run them tends to out weigh their versatility. Add to that they are expensive to engineer and maintain compared to the much simpler watercraft available.
I have to agree that the hovercraft has three major drawbacks: steering, stopping and powering. If hovercrafts were successful, SUV owners would be seen in a more positive light.
Just to echo what everyone else has said: the major intrinsic disadvantages (cost, control, sensitivity to weather) out-weighed the advantages (speed, travel on land as well as water) for practically all commercial situations. Speed, well people have already menationed the Chunnel, but hovercraft also have to compete with fast ferries that can be much larger and not that much slower (about 40 knots against 60ish), as for travel over land, this is of no benefit for most ferry routes in countries where you have well developed major ports with RoRo docks.
Like Otara, I actually crossed the Channel in one of the big Mountbatten class craft back in the seventies and it wasn’t much fun. Noisy and with a strange jerking motion as it hit the waves, you couldn’t even see out the windows due to the spray thrown up around the skirt.
Thanks for the replies so far, everyone! I missed the opportunity to cross the channel by hovercraft in '96 because of the weather (the conventional ferry was fine though) and in '98 they’d just gotten the Chunnel working properly (and affordably!) so there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to get a “Channel Tunnel” stamp in my passport…
I figured they were probably expensive to run, but just seemed to be one of those really nifty pieces of technology that someone would find a way to make viable because… well, just because. You know, like Concorde.
Used to have them in Hong Kong for commuting to discovery bay. It was not a real pleasant experience. There were better, faster and cheaper ways to do the water commute and the hovercraft were taken out of service.
Besides “ordinary” hovercraft, why is it that ekranoplans not only aren’t in wide use, but aren’t very well known? They’ve been around since about World War II
There were plans in 2007 to re-start a commuter hovercraft route (one had run for a couple of years back in the 80s, I think) between Edinburgh and Kirkcaldy across the Firth of Forth (about 12 miles or so).
There was a trial period (youtube) but the operator wanted the government to pay for the landing facilities at either end rather than assuming the costs themselves, so nothing happened.
Besides the reasons mentioned here I have always heard that 1) they are extremely loud, and 2) whenever I have seen one in use on land they seem to kick up a LOT of dirt, dust, and debris.
Two more reasons they didn’t gain popularity.
One of the things I have stuck in my head for no reason that I know; is a Popular Mechanics(or one of that crowd) issue that promissed around 1988 or so that cross-Atlantic airplane service would be replaced by gigantic 3000 passenger GEVs by 2000.
Let’s be honest: The only reason we’re even paying attention to the idea of the hovercraft is because it’s the closest thing IRL to what we really want: Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder. (From a universe where some vehicles float on antigravity fields and are drawn by the functional equivalent of horses.)
