Hovercraft - Blog Posts
Can you finally buy a hovercraft?
"Take the aircraft engine out!" - the AP1-88 hovercraft
The Tim Traveller has just dropped a video about the massive SR.N4 car-carrying cross-channel hovercraft (which got a mention here) on display at Portsmouth, and he notes that there is still an active hovercraft service between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. That reminded me that I had a couple of pictures of that, and I thought I was primed for part 3 of "stick an aircraft engine in it". Two problems though.
First problem, the pictures aren't great. Taken in 2012 from the Mont Saint Michel ferry exiting Portsmouth harbour with my previous camera, which had a less powerful zoom and a lower resolution than my current one. It's still enough, in conjunction with the Wikipedia page on Hovertravel, the company that operates these vehicles, to narrow it down. The hovercraft can only be one of two vessels, the Freedom 90 or the Island Express (squinting at the bow it might be former), but the exact identity matters little. Both are of the same type: an AP1-88 built by the British Hovercraft Corporation, successor to Saunders-Roe who built the big cross-channel model.
And that's where the second problem arises: the AP1-88 is not powered by aircraft engines! It is powered by 4 Diesel engines, making it much quieter and more economical to run, while still capable of reaching 50 knots. It shows that passenger hovercraft transport is possible without gas turbines, and Hovertravel's current fleet consists of two Diesel hovercraft built in 2016 by Griffon.
Nonetheless, chalk up the hovercraft as something I have seen in action!
