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Transatlantic? By 1963, British engineers had solved the clearance problem by equipping hovercraft with rubberized canvas skirts several feet long. Although the skirts were strong enough to contain the pressurized air—enabling hovercraft to rise several feet above the ground—they were flexible enough to brush over solid obstacles and high waves. The development of skirts converted the hovercraft from an experimental device into a practical means of transportation. The British Hovercraft Corp. has already built and sold seven-ton, 18-passenger hovercraft and nine-ton, 38-passenger models like those in operation at Expo 67. Both have a 4-ft. clearance. Two larger versions will soon come off the company's Isle of Wight production line: a 40-ton model that will carry eight autos and 160 passengers, and a 165-ton craft that will carry 32 autos and 250 passengers and have skirts long enough for a 12-ft. clearance on land. Two of the 165-tonners will be in regular service across the English Channel by 1968, making their runs at speeds as high as 85 m.p.h. By the end of 1970, the company expects to have developed 300-to 400-ton air-cushion ships that will be capable of operating on the open seas. Inventor Cockerell visualizes a 10,000-ton atomic-powered craft that will cross the Atlantic at high speeds with 2,000 passengers aboard.
Bell Aerosystems, British Hovercraft's licensee in the U.S., has manufactured hovercraft that have been used success fully in an experimental ferry run across San Francisco Bay and as high-speed gunboats to hunt down Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. It has just sold its first two commercial craft to an Alaska firm that will use them to supply offshore drilling operations. Using the hover principle on land, a French hover train, suspended above a monorail by a thin cushion of air, has already reached speeds of 190 m.p.h.
Esoteric Future. The hover principle has equally good prospects in industry. British Hovercraft is producing hover pallets, air-cushion platforms that can be used to move heavy industrial loads. In a recent British Hovercraft demonstration, for example, a 41-ton machine tool on a hover pallet was easily pushed several feet by two men. By fixing a skirt around a 14-ton oil-storage tank at a military depot and pumping in air, hovercraft technicians were able to move the tank on a cushion of air across a road and a railroad line to a new location. A hover transporter, designed for Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board, has already been used to carry a 155-ton transformer over a bridge that otherwise would have failed under the load: a hover platform built into the transporter suspended the transformer on a cushion of air, reducing its effective weight by about 70 tons.
Engineers foresee even more esoteric uses. They have already designed a hover kiln, in which pottery is suspended over a moving conveyor belt by the hot gases used to bake it. And they are attempting to perfect a hover bed for badly burned patients who would actually lie on a thin film of air, thus avoiding painful contact with the bed sheets and allowing healing on all sides.