What happened to the Ekranoplan? - The Caspian Sea Monster

In 1967 whilst the US's first spy satellite Corona was busy photographing the Soviet Union something unusual was spotted. It looked like a massive plane but its wings were too short it also sported the Soviet Navy flag on its fuselage, so what was it maybe an unidentified aircraft or some new design of amphibious vehicle. This Leviathan was in fact the Ekranoplan, a new class of what is now known as a ground effect vehicle and that uses a phenomenon that occurs when a wing is traveling close to the ground. The ekranoplan was the brainchild of Rostislav Alexeyev a Russian designer who began his career working on high-speed Hydrofoils. Throughout the 1950s he developed a number of successful ships, rising to lead the central hydrofoil design bureau in the city of Gorky on the river Volga. But still his thirst speed led him to his most famous idea to lift the hydrofoils fins out of water entirely. Alexeyev's innovation was to use this ground effect phenomena and he envisioned a huge vehicle with a capacity of a ship but the speed of an aircraft. The ground effect works when a wing is provided with extra lift by the cushion of trapped air between the surface below and the wing itself and enables a combination of greater aircraft weight for less power and or greater fuel efficiency. However his designs would cost a lot of money to build, a tough sell when the resources were thinly spread in Soviet Russia. However if a military use for the ekranoplan could be found then the project's models could be scaled up. The Gorky engineers drew up plans for a prototype ekranoplan that would be large enough to transport hundreds of troops or bring a battery of missiles to within range of enemy territory. The benefits for the Navy were obvious, the ekranoplan would travel at high speed just above the surface of a sea but below enemy radar, it would also be immune to mines, torpedoes and anti-submarine Nets. In 1960 Alexeyev attended a communist party meeting where Khrushchev was in attendance and immediately captured the imagination of the Soviet premier. Khrushchev saw the ekranoplan as a way to face up to America's mighty aircraft carriers and championed Alekseyev's design Bureau. Khrushchev would later boast that the USSR had boats that could jump over bridges but of course everyone assumed he was just joking at the time. In the early 1960s everything about the ekranoplan including its name was classified. The project was known as steamboat which must have seemed appropriate as the prototype took shape around a boat like hull. The first working model was known as KM or Korabl maket meaning simply 'prototype ship' although vered KM was hidden in wooden casings and only moved at night the strange shape was soon spotted in images on the American Corona reconnaissance satellite. The defense agency puzzled over what it could be. The squat wings didn't seem capable of lifting an aircraft of that size in fact they were so concerned as to what it might be the CIA were even going to use a special remote-controlled drone project called Aquiline that originally had been developed to spy on the Chinese nuclear program but its unreliability forced them to abandon the idea. Because of the letters KM painted on its back they gave it the nickname 'Kaspian Monster' but it soon became commonly known as their Caspian Sea Monster to those in the West. On October the 16th 1966 KM was prepared for its maiden flight. Alexeyev himself was on board, which was against all the usual rules that dictated that designers should not ride on test vehicles. The giant ekranoplan lifted from the waves and accelerated to 400 kilometers an hour with a power of his eight huge turbojet engines at the front and two more at the rear. Then the roar of its engines quietened and the KM cruised just as Alexeyev had claimed. The eight front engines not only provided most of a forward thrust their exhaust was also angled down to direct air under the short wings to give him an extra cushion of air to ride on. During the 50-minute flight the fuselage flexed and rolled, an issue which would later be rectified by strengthening the body panels. But the ekranoplan worked, they had proved that their seamonster could fly. However the political tides of the Soviet Union were about to turn. Khrushchev was ejected from office in 1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev who was deeply skeptical of the oversized concepts like KM. Alexeyev and his engineering team went to Brezhnev to present their ideas directly but the premier was unimpressed at the end of a presentation his only comment was about the lunch. Under the new administration Alexeyev's dream of a fleet of giant ekranoplans began to fade, however his central hydrofoil design bureau was given to go ahead to build a smaller transport vehicle based on the same technology called the 'Orlyonok' or 'Baby Eagle' The first military ekranoplan was still a huge beast 80% as long as a boeing 747 jet and able to move 140 Marines or two fully loaded armored personnel carrier vehicles. Alexeyev's design bureau also developed another military ekranoplan this time an aircraft carrier killer called 'Lun' which means Harrier in english. At 280 tons and 74 metres long Lun was equipped with six mosquito rocket launchers along its dorsal edge which could engage an enemy ship from 90 kilometers away. However the ekranoplan required considerable skill to operate and keep at his optimal height of 20 meters above the water. Pilots also reported fatigue from constantly scanning the oncoming waves for small boats. In 1975 during a test flight for one of the Orlyonok vehicles a tale and rear-engine broke off in rough seas. Luckily Alexeyev was on board and took control from the pilot quickly engaging the remaining engines to land the crippled ekranoplan on the shore. Although he had saved the crew, the soviet military chiefs blamed Alexeyev for the accident and removed him as the chief designer of the bureau. Alexeyev's independent character had put him at odds with the soviet establishment and within years he was demoted again and eventually sidelined. Alexeyev withdrew from his research and spent long days sailing and battling storms in an elemental struggle with the sea. In his final years he despairingly told his daughter "i haven't achieved what I wanted to do". In 1980, aged 63 he died of injuries he received in an accident whilst testing a new ekranoplan which was to be shown at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. That year would also see Alexeyev's greatest invention laid to rest. On December 15th the KM prototype by this time in poor condition launched for a test flight. The inexperienced pilot reportedly attempted a takeoff without engaging full power and the sea monster crashed sinking in 20 meters of water. Although the giant tail and stabilizer protruded above a water for a time the first Ekranoplan was simply too massive to be recovered and it remains in the Caspian Sea to this day lurking just beneath the waves. In 1984 one of the Ekranoplans main supporters the Minister of Defence, Dmitriy Ustinov died and soon after funding was removed from a project. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the remaining Ekranoplans were abandoned. The massive Lun ended up in Kaspiysk where it is still there today, whilst one of the last Orlyonoks was moved to a Russian Navy Museum in Moscow. Although the soviets and later the Russians were the main proponents of the ground effect vehicles other countries including South Korea, China and Germany have all built their own versions in varying sizes though nothing has been on the scale of the original ekranoplans. In 2002 Boeing in the US, unveiled a monster-sized design called the Pelican which would have been the biggest plane ever built, the length of a football field with a wingspan of a152 meters and capable of carrying 1,400 tons of cargo, it would fly at 20,000 feet over land but over open oceans it would fly just 20 feet above waves and use the ground effect to make it more efficient. However since its unveiling nothing more has been heard of a Pelican. So what do you think of the EKranoplans? a possible future transport system or technological dead-end let me know what you think in the comments. I would also like to thank all of our patrons for their ongoing support and you can find out more on the link now showing and don't forget to check out some of our other videos too. So it just remains for me to say thanks for watching and please subscribe, thumbs up and share.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 1,543,828

Rating: 4.9385443 out of 5

Keywords: kaspian monster, caspian sea monster, Rostislav Alexeyev, Ekranoplan, Lun, ground-effect, wing in ground effect, wing in ground effect aircraft, wing in ground, paul shillito, curious droid, curious-droid.com, km, Korabl maket, project aquiline, Orlyonok, ground effect plane, ground-effect aerodynamics, ground-effect vehicle

Id: x22nVFTd8nI

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/logoriel]

“Back to the sea you go. May you rest in quiet slumber.”

[u/[deleted]]

Damn Yukes

[u/Blue_Bi0hazard]

Imagine a carrier ground effect plane boss mission as an invading force and you have to stop it.

Can launch missles, deploy fighters and drones, and barrier counter measures.

Its would have to use the ground to its advantage and the danger is that you are low