Four years ago, our research group was invited to participate in an EU-funded research project to develop an unmanned flying ship, a ground effect ship.
A wing-in-ground-effect or winged ship, WIG, is a vehicle that looks like an airplane and flies a few meters above the ground or sea. Many of you probably remember the “Caspian Sea Monster” of WIG ships, which the Soviet Union developed during the Cold War.
The advantages of a winged ship are speed and low fuel consumption compared to airplanes. The disadvantages, on the other hand, are sensitivity to weather conditions and instability. The inventor of WIG ships is considered to be Finnish Toivo J. Kaario, who began developing a wig-ship, or surface glider, while studying at Helsinki University of Technology in 1931.
Later, attempts have been made to develop the same concept around the world, and even now the internet presents several startups that plan transport with a WIG ship. The most well-known of these is probably REGENT, whose working concept today is based on foils.
I approached the project idea with the healthy skepticism of an older scientist. For decades, I have come across countless innovative projects that plan a very fast and expensive mode of transport, and the plans ignore the competition from a more traditional and cheaper mode of transport. For example, Hyperloop trains, which unfortunately do not have enough market opportunity under the pressure of fast airplanes and cheap train or car transport – or drone delivery, which should compete with cheap electric moped delivery (the drone market opportunity is somewhere that cannot be reached by land).
I was wrong. The rapid tightening of environmental regulations in transport in the last decade and the development of technology have made an electric, automatic and unmanned WIG ship possible and probably so cheap that it can compete with air and sea transport. We found several products to transport, including food, for which speed is a necessity and for which this type of sea transport, which is significantly cheaper than air transport, is suitable. In our calculations, we examined a ship with a speed of about 200 km/h and a capacity of a few tons.
However, there are only a limited number of suitable applications. Even if WIG ships become more common, they will mainly complement current air and sea transport. According to international regulations, this vessel is a ship – all vessels flying below 150 meters above sea level are ships and therefore subject to the regulations of the International Maritime Organization. The first applications will probably be coastal traffic, such as the connection from Spain to the Canary Islands or to Kihnu in Estonia. International maritime traffic regulations still need to be modified for such fast vessels. In the future, the vessel may also be developed for passenger transport, but this will likely require a lot more development work, especially in terms of safety regulations.
So maybe ships will fly in the future – at least our research gives strong support for it. This summer we will at least see the finished prototype of the project in flight.
More information about the Airship project can be found here.
Photo: Airship miniature model in flight in Mänttä last November. Photographer Kalle Hakonen-Milosevic, CC BY 4.0, 7 November 2025
The article was previously published in Navigator Magazine, an online magazine for maritime professionals, on March 6, 2026.
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