Word: hovercrafts
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...Hovercraft is becoming less of a novelty and more of a serious mode of transportation. A vehicle that skims on a cushion of air over land, ice or water, the Hovercraft carried 370,000 passengers on brief trips along the St. Lawrence River during Expo 67 and proved to be one of the fair's most popular attractions. Now it is being used for such diverse purposes as ferrying passengers between British coastal resort towns and hunting down Viet Cong in the swamps of the Mekong Delta...
Last week the so-called air-cushion vehicle (ACV) got its biggest commercial test when a 165-ton SR.N4, the world's largest Hovercraft, was introduced on regularly scheduled passenger runs across the English Channel between Dover and the French coastal city of Boulogne. The thrice daily round-trip crossings, which will be expanded to six starting this week, are of crucial importance to the British Hovercraft Corp., which builds the SR.N4. "Our necks are on the chopping block," admits Richard Stanton-Jones, managing director. "Potential buyers will be here watching and riding...
Among those watching the cross-channel undertaking most closely are Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and Buffalo-based Bell Aerosystems Co. Both companies manufacture their own ACV versions, also serve as British Hovercraft licensees. The fledgling industry's leader, British Hovercraft, was formed in 1966 by Westland Aircraft Ltd., Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd., and the government-run National Research and Development Corp., which together have pumped $48 million into the craft's development...
Profits are still a long way off, but British Hovercraft is thinking big. Applying the hover principle to industry, the company is currently producing, mostly on an experimental basis, an air-cushion pallet called "Float-a-Load," which can be used to move industrial equipment weighing up to five tons. Its hopes are highest for the $4,000,000 SR.N4, whose potential market over the next ten years could exceed 100 orders if all goes well on its showcase channel crossings...
...hovercraft owes its good performance in rough seas to a kind of 7-ft.-high, nylon-and-rubber maxiskirt, which confines the cushion of compressed air below the craft but deflects when it strikes wave tops or other obstacles. To further lessen any impact, the skirt is fringed with rubber fingers that are even more flexible than the main body of the skirt. The 19½-ft. propellers, driven by four 3,400-h.p. Rolls-Royce engines, are mounted on pylons and can be swiveled 30°, enabling them to be used with two huge air rudders in maneuvering...