NZ Off topic

That's awesome, thanks for sharing! For your first link about the Soviet programme, they talk about all the issues, and hypothesize that getting these working properly probably requires larger aircraft than has ever been built, because these can fly higher under ground effect, up to 10 or 20 metres.

Given the original article here states these tiny planes will fly 10 metres above the sea, I am skeptical that they will properly operate under ground effect. Wikipedia states that the effect is about half of the craft's wingspan, putting it at a lot less than the 10 metres claimed.

And as mentioned in this comment chain, the nice videos in the article are actually all little models and it seems they haven't actually built any of these craft at full size, so the chances are pretty low that anything will actually come of it.

Kinda, although an aircraft that operates exclusively in ground effect is explicitly not an aircraft as far as CAA is concerned, so they’re outside their rules.

Interesting!

As far as recharge time is concerned, I assume they would be able to fast charge in half an hour or so, like any other electric vehicle.

For EVs to charge in 30 mins, you need some pretty beefy power infrastructure, it's not something available at residential houses. So if the battery capacity is a lot higher, you might not be able to get charged in that short amount of time. I'd expect power usage to be much higher for this plane than an EV, given it's a lot larger.

But now I think about it, it might not be that much larger. Having just read up on the concept of ground-effect I guess it may be more efficient than an EV, so perhaps you'd get away with batteries about twice as large as a long-range EV? Given the right setup you could probably still do an 80% charge in under an hour, so flying each way on a 2 hour schedule would be pretty doable. Run a second one to double the frequency.