Looking back at aviation history you will remember the Wright brother's first aircraft, then the Red Baron, and then todays modern airliners. The design of an aircraft is represented by it's performance, but sometimes man goes behind the conventional creation, there you can see many strange projects that took shape out of the need for better results. Aesthetic claimed only a small percentage of an aircraft, due to production costs and technologies not yet available.
There is one machine that is forgotten and that stands in between transport categories: the Ekranoplane. It is an airplane with wings and tail that never takes off, it works thanks to the ground-effect generated between the plane and water. In fact this machine can only hover on a body of water (lake or sea), and it was widely used by the USSR during the Cold War period. Objects like that used to travel across the Caspian Sea like trains from the station. The revolutionary concept was something new in the aviation reality.
German designer Luigi Colani conceived a futuristic definition of the ekranoplane (pic below). He designed a prototype with superior aesthetic characteristics, which brought the concept into a different design status.
There is one machine that is forgotten and that stands in between transport categories: the Ekranoplane. It is an airplane with wings and tail that never takes off, it works thanks to the ground-effect generated between the plane and water. In fact this machine can only hover on a body of water (lake or sea), and it was widely used by the USSR during the Cold War period. Objects like that used to travel across the Caspian Sea like trains from the station. The revolutionary concept was something new in the aviation reality.
German designer Luigi Colani conceived a futuristic definition of the ekranoplane (pic below). He designed a prototype with superior aesthetic characteristics, which brought the concept into a different design status.
