Balancing the demands of family and work life has been a challenge this year. That is my excuse anyway, for this being the first Blog since February.
In fact, the first half of this year included a significant effort to compile and publish our Light and Recreational Hovercraft Directory. It felt like years ago in my early offshore career, when projects always seemed to take longer than planned. Luckily that hasn’t damped my optimism!
The Directory has turned out a good product and should mature in the coming years. If you as a reader haven’t read it or referred to it, then do give it a try, just go here! It was amazing to find the activity ongoing throughout the world.
If you are not a member, you will be missing our News Notes, which are delivered by email and archived in the members area. While rather biased, I venture to suggest that these are the world’s best regular summary of Hovercraft and SES world activity. There are always links to new videos as well as both industrial and recreational news.
To receive a sample copy, all it takes is an email here, with a genuine personal email address to reply to. Better than that, why not apply to join our society? This year the membership fees have been reduced to make joining attractive to as wide as possible audience. Go here to see the rates.
Currently we are preparing for our annual conference and dinner on 22nd November, in Portsmouth, UK. As a Technical Society, this is our core physical event of the year, where members and a wide range of those interested in the technology can meet informally, find out the latest from an afternoon of technical presentations, and finish with a convivial dinner.
Visitors are welcome – just so long as you will register beforehand as explained here.
This year Hovertravel are celebrating their 60th year of operations across the Solent between Southsea and Ryde. THS joins in congratulating the company for its success to date.
In the background, work continues building the THS Internet site, the open part of which you are viewing just now. The members area includes the members library that now contains all the THS conference papers to date, as well as quite a collection of technical papers from other sources, This even includes three key reports on light hovercraft design, and a couple of books covering the same area.
Over the coming year a significant library of the reports and conferences from the Canadian Air Cushion Technology Society will be added, following permission from the Canadian Aerospace and Space Institute and digitising the documents from paper.
This work is intended to establish a library suitable for student research and support to engineers as we move forward.
One design area that continues to move forward is cushion and skirt design. Some elements may not be noticeable unless this speciality is your interest. Nevertheless, the current generation US LCAC skirts are quite a development from the earliest models used. The UK Wyvern LCAC cushion system may bring this type of design further forward.
The cushion systems for racing craft, at the other end of the scale have also gone through significant development in the last decade or so. This is natural considering that those out in front of a race are speeding up to 60 mph and perhaps more.
In India six new craft are being built for the coastguard there. They are designed and with project support from Griffon Marine and are being built in a new hall at Chowgule Shipyard. Reliable licenced construction with close support is important for successful widening of the hovercraft industry.
Two other areas that have affected hovercraft development since the early days has been the noise profile, and more recently the drive towards zero emissions.
This year has seen the first all-electric recreational hovercraft go into ‘service’ mode in the UK, while in Australia trials of an electric propulsion unit to complement an electric lift system already in a production recreational craft has been undergoing tests.
Meanwhile it has become apparent that biodiesel (in other words diesel refined from ‘waste’ oils rather than crude oil) may be a way forward for many existing utility craft enabling a reduction of up to 90% in CO2 emissions. The challenge at present seems to be on the supply side. Some refinery projects for this new fuel have recently been mothballed. While not stated, the ability to reach profit targets for the product are difficult compared to refined crude oil (there is a similar problem at present for plastics production from recycled plastic materials), so until regulations kick in there will be delays to switching by the market. It will come, and the market will grumble, and then adapt, eventually helping the planet.
The electric propulsion systems for recreational craft will significantly reduce their noise profile, which should also enable competitive events to be in a wider range of locations and encourage some different events than those currently run.
There is quite a way to go for electric small hovercraft, not least due to the costs of batteries at present, and the technical knowledge for full marinisation. Luckily there are sufficient specialist enthusiasts working with the new technology that the market should develop quite quickly in the next few years. Clearly, development will take time, but there again it has taken the global car industry perhaps two decades to move from prototypes to the current market status, supported also by various government support programmes worldwide.
I haven’t touched on SES in this Blog, but nevertheless there has been a major move forward with SES this year. Something on that is for the next issue – so do visit later in November!
THS Technical Secretary
October 2025
Question – When and where was this – hint 1972 and thanks to Neil MacDonald
