Out of curiosity, how many of you are familiar with WIG (Wing-In-Ground) effect planes? For that matter, anybody here an aerospace engineer?

 

Long story short, I'm thinking about building a WIG craft / hovercraft, and I was wondering if anybody had ideas for where to start out. I have hardly any idea where to begin with airfoil shape, body shape, etc - although I am familiar with the extremely basic principles of flight. Any good books on aerodynamics would be great too. As far as the maths in the books go, by the end of this year I'll be through with AP Calc BC (roughly a full year's worth of college/uni-level calculus, a bit shy of multivariable calculus), and I'm perfectly willing to learn more - and I teach myself quite well. Oh, and I'll also have completed AP Physics (I don't know if I'll be taking the B or the C test yet, but I hope to take the C, which would be roughly equivalent to a full year of college/uni-level introductory physics).

 

I'm going to be building a wind tunnel first chance I get, too (possibly this weekend), and I've already built a hovercraft. It's currently being redesigned and rebuilt (something else I hope to finish this weekend).

 

Any suggestions would be great, and thanks much.

WIG (Wing-In-Ground) effect planes are the best example around of a solution looking for a problem.

There's plenty of problems that WIG planes are a solution for. Here's two, off the top of my head: airlifting massive tonnage and skimming about a meter above the ground or water. It's like a souped-up hovercraft in that respect.

Trouble is that applications like that look good on paper but the market for them doesn't materialise. The Russians have been at the WIG game for decades and even under a command economy couldn't find much use for them.

 

The big issue with heavy carriage is that there are few commodities that ship in bulk that are time sensitive enough to warrant the added expense of shipping them on a WIG craft over a regular boat.

That's still aside from the point, though - I don't want to make one because of the economics of it, I want to make one (mostly) for the sake of making one.

About the best site on the net is:

 

http://www.se-technology.com/wig/index.php

 

A lot of info on WIGs.