the Ekranoplans, the huge monsters of the Caspian Sea gestated in the Cold War

Get in situation. We are in the decade of the 50s, in the middle of the Cold War. The tension between the two world superpowers is maximum and both the United States and the Soviet Union struggle to carry out constant demonstrations of strength. A minimum advance in any field was considered a victory, but in the USSR things are done differently, in a big way.

Now imagine that you need a fast vehicle, with great transport capacity, that can execute a blunt attack almost undetected. The answer is called ekranoplan and perhaps one of the most extraordinary creations you can imagine, a kind of bastard son between a ship and a plane capable of flying over water.


During the Second World War in Russia they developed a huge amount of ships capable of transporting troops, supplies and vehicles at high speed on the water, but it was not enough. The other day talking about Russian amphibians appeared the Pomornik (Zubr Project 1232.2), a huge hovercraft that delved into this premise with a maximum speed of 116 km / h and 555 Tm of carrying capacity, but it was not enough either.

Looking for something even more extreme, Russian engineer Rostislav Alexeiev turned the tortilla around. If we can't make a boat faster, let's try to fly a plane over the water. Alexeiev was based on the first designs of the German engineer Alexander Lippisch and presented the project to the authorities and Nikita Khrushchev (leader of the USSR during the Cold War and successor of Yosif Stalin) endowed the engineer with unlimited funds.

After countless scale tests that launched into the water from a slide, the result was the first prototypes. A huge vehicles of strange forms whose intention was not to be mere airplanes, but to use a form of displacement opposite to those of them, the ground effect that in Russian (ecranniy effect) gives name to these machines.
The first of the lineage of Russian Ekranoplanes was the KM that appeared in 1966. It was a mass of 544 tons, 106 meters long and 42 wingspan that could move over water at more than 400 km / h about 3 meters above the surface thanks to its 10 jet engines. A beast that surprised the Americans in the satellite images and baptized him as the Caspian Sea Monster (Kaspian Monster) by the acronym KM that were seen in his fuselage.

The objectives were fulfilled, they had created a spawn that could transport 1,000 soldiers on the water, even with waves of five meters, on icy surfaces or plains without obstacles.
Unfortunately for the USSR and for the development of the Ekranoplanes, this mechanical bestiality was lost in an accident. Being an ekranoplane and not an airplane, a gust of wind destabilized the ship and the pilot chose to rise instead of approaching the surface, the aircraft lost the ground effect and crashed in 1980.

But the Ekranoplanes were not just a matter of the KM prototype. Also the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 arrived that appeared in the 70s. Both the VVA-14M1 and the VVA-14M2 and VVA-14M3 sported a fuselage that we could not classify as pretty precisely, with forms of film spaceship of Series B.

The first two were development prototypes, but the VVA-14M3 was the final version ready for deployment in combat. It met the requirements of being fast and difficult to identify, but they could also fly at a height much higher than the KM overlapping with the usefulness of an airplane although with a much lower stability without the support of the ground effect.

Another of the models that were created on a smaller scale were the A-90 Orlyonok of 1972, or so they tried. They were ships with a much smaller wingspan with only 58 meters in length and wings that were considerably narrower than those of the Caspian Sea Monster.

Its design was intended to be fast and more agile (within the or agile a vehicle of this type can be) and was equipped with only two turbines embedded under the cockpit. In them was its greatest novelty since they directly directed the flow of exhaust gases under the wings to increase the ground effect.

Called to be the most popular of the Ekranoplans, the production of 120 units of the Orlyonok was scheduled, reducing to 30 units over the years and finally, after the death of Marshal Dmitri Ustínov (patron of the project), the financing was canceled of the A-90 when only 3 or 4 units had been built.

Taking up the silhouettes that made the KN famous, the Lun and Spasatel ekranoplans were the most modern of all manufactured. They appeared as early as the 80s with their huge engine batteries placed on the sides of the cabin and while Spasatel was designed as a fast-intervention mobile hospital to deal with nautical catastrophes, the Lun was a weapon of mass destruction.

The 10 engines of the Lun could displace this brown beast of the Cold War at unthinkable speeds on the water (+500 km / h), being able to move up to 100 tons of cargo but also with the tactical and offensive capabilities, being able to launch moving missiles with which to destroy aircraft carriers, Moskit supersonic missiles and, yes, nuclear warheads.

Fortunately for all, calmer times arrived and such crazy projects disappeared into oblivion. But undoubtedly the Ekranoplans are means of transport that will remain for the memory, even if it is as part of a worldwide turbulent era and of which only a few remains are left in a state of abandonment.