What happened to the passenger hovercraft?
It is
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.
Hovercraft
cross the sand to arrive on the concrete landing pad near the centre of
Ryde, the Isle of Wight's largest town. This amphibious mode of
transport, with its rapid disembarkation - not needing the building of a
pier or port - was seen as the future once. But the Solent is now
thought to be the only place in western Europe where a full passenger
service operates.
The cross-Channel service from Dover to Calais closed
in 2000. The two vessels, the Princess Anne and the Princess Margaret,
could carry only 52 cars. Larger ferries and cheaper-to-power
catamarans, as well as the Channel Tunnel, proved too much competition.
Routes in Japan and Sierra Leone have also since ceased.
"The problem militating against expansion has always
been the noise for residents, who have to hear the hovercraft all day,
365 days a year," says Warwick Jacobs, who runs the Hovercraft Museum,
at Gosport, Hampshire. "The sound can travel quite a way, depending on
the wind speed. We could have had hovercraft running on the Thames, for
instance, but they'd have been too noisy."
Recent models are
quieter than their predecessors because of more efficient engines, while
plans are in place to build electric-powered hovercraft, which will
reduce the decibel count even further, Jacobs says.
The Hovertravel service between Southsea and Ryde
survives because hovercraft are best suited to short routes like those
across the Solent, says Robin Paine, co-author of On a Cushion of Air, a
history of hovercraft. "There is also a need because the tide at Ryde
goes out half a mile - hence the reason for Ryde Pier to accommodate
conventional ferries, whereas the hovercraft can deliver people straight
into Ryde."
It's
60 years since inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the
principle of hovercraft travel - discussed in abstract terms since the
18th Century - in an eccentrically British way. He experimented with
vacuum cleaner tubes and empty cat food and coffee tins, finding that
when placing a small can inside a larger one and blowing air through the
smaller can, it hovered above the bottom surface of the larger object. A
working prototype was ready by 1955, which Cockerell called the
"hovercraft", obtaining a patent in 1956.
A cushion of air is created by a
large fan underneath. A "skirt" surrounding the craft prevents too much
air from escaping. Because the craft is moving through air rather than
water, it can go faster than a conventional boat of similar power. It
can also travel over land and sea.
At first, the government classified hovercraft as
"airborne" rather than seagoing craft, meaning "strict requirements" on
operating hours, says Bill Moses, director of the maritime consultancy
firm FMS. He argues that this restricted growth of the use of hovercraft
in the UK.
But in June 1962 shipbuilder Vickers launched the
UK's first commercial hovercraft service across the estuary of the River
Dee. In 1965 another short-lived line began on the Clyde, linking
Glasgow with locations including Largs and Rothesay. In the same year,
the Isle of Wight service started.
Larger craft began operating across the English
Channel from 1966 - the SRN-4, capable of carrying cars as well as foot
passengers, started in 1968.
But there were setbacks. In 1972, five people died when a Ryde to Southsea SRN-6 overturned in a gale.
In 1974, Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe took an
electioneering tour of coastal towns on a hovercraft. This was struck by
a large wave when leaving Sidmouth, in Devon, causing irreparable
damage. "We are going to get another hovercraft on Monday for our tour
of the south coast," Mr Thorpe said. "This is a great British machine.
If the British hovercraft has any future, then we must continue to use
it."
Hovercraft maintained some of their early glamour, featuring
in James Bond films. In 1979's Moonraker a Venetian gondola sprouts an
air cushion, allowing 007 to escape his pursuers by mounting steps and
speeding through St Mark's Square. There is a two-hovercraft chase scene
in 2002's Die Another Day.
This is the stuff of fantasy, but organisations such
as the British Royal Marines, the Swedish coastguard and Lithuania's
border police make use of these craft when transporting personnel and
supplies to difficult-to-access locations, including rough beaches and
swamps.
Since 2002, the UK's RNLI has used hovercraft for rescues on tidal mudflats, sand too soft to support land vehicles and water too shallow for boats.
"A resurgence of passenger hovercraft is easily possible," says Jacobs. "Running costs have fallen."
For
now, though, the Southsea to Ryde passenger service, which celebrated its
50th anniversary this year, pays a lonely homage to Cockerell.
Hovertravel has invested £10m in two new hovercraft - the first
passenger models to be built and used in the UK for a decade.
"We
will be a shop window for any existing or potential ferry operator who
wants to be fast and frequent like us," says Loretta Lale, Hovertravel's
commercial manager. "Our service has always attracted global interest
and when the world sees what a 21st Century hovercraft can do we
anticipate considerable interest."
Sir Christopher Cockerell
- Born the son of a museum curator in 1910, he studied engineering at Cambridge
- He helped make the first radio direction finder, used by British bombers during World War Two
- Cockerell also worked with the team at Marconi that developed radar
- He was knighted in 1969 and died in 1999
NOW SEE THE LATEST ON THE NEW FOCUS FLICKR SITE:
The latest album placed on the flickr site can now be viewed by clicking here
