Flying Along on a Cushion of Grease

For airplanes, ground effect comes into play only during certain brief parts of a flight. Not so for wingships.

Thursday, February 08, 2024 at 11:36 AM ET

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Despite considerable government support in the early 1990s, the Russian ekranoplan program, of which this Strizh was a part, came to nothing. Blame it on ground effect.

Key Takeaways:

Ground effect is an aerodynamic phenomenon where flying very close to a surface significantly reduces an aircraft's induced drag, a byproduct of lift, rather than providing extra lift through a "cushion of air."
Historically explored by specialized "ekranoplans" in Russia, ground effect impacts conventional aircraft and helicopter operations during low-altitude flight phases like takeoff and landing.
For pilots, ground effect can cause "floating" during landing due to reduced drag, and more dangerously, can create a "trap" during takeoff where an aircraft gets airborne but lacks the power to climb out of ground effect.
Despite offering efficiency benefits, the advantage of ground effect diminishes at higher speeds, which presents a fundamental limitation for dedicated "wingships" compared to traditional aircraft.

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In 1993, an assignment from FLYING took me unusually far afield. Somewhere east of Moscow, in the center of a land that had recently ceased to be the Soviet Union and was trying to figure out what it meant to be Russia again, I clung with one hand to my camera and the other to the doorframe of a radial-engined Antonov biplane as it flew low over the Volga.

Alongside and below me flew a Strizh. My Russian dictionary, a relic of college days, translates strizh as “martin” or “sand martin.” Another source offers “martlet,” which is certainly incorrect. Some kind of bird, at any rate. But this strizh was not a bird. It was an airplane of a special kind that the Russians called an ekranoplan.