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What Happened to Passenger Hovercraft?

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-old-air-bag dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

It's 60 years since the British inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft using a cat food tin and a vacuum cleaner. Great things were promised for this mode of transport, but it never really caught on. Why?

The hovercraft slides down a concrete ramp and into the Solent. Its engines, propellers and fans hum as it crosses from Southsea, in Hampshire, to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, travelling 4.4 nautical miles in under 10 minutes.

The journey is more than twice as quick as the catamaran from Portsmouth to Ryde and more than four times as quick as the Portsmouth-to-Fishbourne ferry.

For that matter, why haven't hydrofoils caught on?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:38PM (#261809)

    It is like the IoT home systems. Sure they are cool and are all wizzy. But simplicity, ease of use, and cost rule the day. Sure I could hook every single one of my lights in my house to a central computer. It looks cool and is cool. But thats about it. At the end of the day it still just lights up my room and a rocker switch on the wall works just as good and does not come with a service contract.

    It is a technical challenge to be sure. But why, when you end up with pretty much the exact same thing which can be had cheaper? I see this sort of thing all the time in software. People throw out years of coding. Because 'its a mess' (translation I dont understand it and am not going to take time to understand it). Total rewrite is undertaken and they end up with either the same thing or worse but slightly technically better.

    If you dont beat the cost (both short and long term) of the simpler solution you will not go anywhere with it. Hovercraft are in the realm of 'cool and wizzy' and have specific places where they can be used. But they have to beat a big tub with a propeller.