During World War II, the Allied transport team in the Atlantic was attacked by German U-boats and suffered heavy losses, and the U.S. military proposed to develop a new type of water transport aircraft to solve this problem. However, due to the large volume and weight of the transport aircraft, it was difficult to provide sufficient lift for it with the technical conditions at that time. To this end, such transport aircraft will fly mainly close to the sea surface, providing additional lift through the "ground effect", that is, ground effect aircraft. Under the leadership of Howard Hughes, the founder of the Hughes Aircraft Company, the H-4 "Spruce Goose" giant seaplane was designed, but due to the disappearance of war needs and technical defects, the H-4 was put into the warehouse after a test flight.
H-4 "Spruce Goose"
In the development of ground effect aircraft, the Soviet Union began to study the ground effect in 1923. In 1935, the Central Hydrodynamic Research Institute of the Soviet Union began relevant research. After World War II, the Soviet Union insisted on research, while the rest of the country was only three minutes hot. At that time, the Soviet Union had two design bureaus to develop ground effect aircraft, namely the Beiliev Aircraft Design Bureau and the Alekseyev Central Design Bureau. The former mainly develops seaplanes, while the latter manufactures ships.
Ground effect vehicles originated in war, so the main use of ground effect aircraft of the Alekseyev Central Design Bureau was also for military purposes. It can be used to launch missiles, anti-submarine and surprise landings. In 1963, the Volga plant began to build prototype ground effect aircraft in response to design requirements. In 1966, the ground effect aircraft prototype was successfully flown for the first time, and its volume continued to expand. The United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries until the early 1980s, accidentally through reconnaissance satellites to discover this kind of aircraft. Surprised by the sheer size of this aircraft, and sailing in the Caspian Sea again, it was nicknamed "Caspian Monster".
"Caspian Monster" parameters:
Length 106.1 m (348 ft), wingspan 40 m (131 ft);
Takeoff weight 495 tons (1,091,000 lb);
The wings are equipped with 8 VD-7 turbojet engines;
Equipped with 2 engines at the rear, moved backwards to the nose, i.e. the top of the cockpit;
With a range of 7,500 kilometers, it is capable of transporting 850 soldiers around the world at a speed of 800 kilometers per hour without being detected by any radar.
The development process was not smooth sailing, and there were two crashes, one in 1969, when the pilots could not distinguish the horizon due to the fog on the lake, resulting in large waves lapping at the fuselage and eventually crashing. Another time was in 1980, so the reason was a pilot error. But it provides a lot of valuable data for the subsequent development of a series of ground effect aircraft.
But unfortunately, the "Caspian Monster" because of the high cost of counterfeiting, under the technical conditions at that time, the airframe life, structural waste weight is too large also offset the advantage, the weight of the ground effect aircraft is far greater than the seaplane, which means that the impact of landing will be much larger than the seaplane, limited by the performance of existing materials, the project was finally shelved. If the project is not shelved, imagine that Russia will be a different scenario when it confronts NATO.