A new era in transport was unveiled on June 11th, 1959, when a prototype hovercraft took to the Solent off England’s South Coast.
It was a successful debut for what would soon become an alternative to traditional ferries, carrying passengers and cars at high speed across the English Channel.
The man behind the revolutionary craft was Christopher Cockerell, a boat-builder, mechanical engineer and inventor from Lowestoft, in Suffolk. He described his new craft as a cross between an aircraft, a boat and a land vehicle, capable of crossing land or water by hovering on a cushion of air created by its own powerful fans.
Cockerell (who was later knighted for his work) began working on a hovercraft concept in the 1950s. His first model, which demonstrated the idea could work, was built using a catfood tin inside a slightly larger coffee tin, with air blown into the gap between them using a hairdryer. He came up with the idea when trying to work out how to make a boat go faster by reducing the friction caused when it travelled through the water.
By 1955 he had convinced the British Government’s Ministry of Supply to back his idea and fund development work, but it brought an unexpected hitch. Because of the concept’s potential military applications, it was placed on the Government’s “secret list”, which meant Cockerell was unable to seek commercial backers for the increasingly viable project.
It took him four years, but in 1959 he managed to get the project removed from the secret list and formed the Hovercraft Development Company Ltd. He also secured £150,000 (almost £3.5 million in today’s money) from the National Research Development Council to take the project forward.
With his designs at an advanced stage, a contract to build the first hovercraft was awarded to Saunders-Roe, a flying boat firm based at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. The result was the Saunders-Roe Nautical 1, abbreviated to SR.N1. It used a single 450hp aero engine to power a vertical fan placed in the middle of the craft. It blew air under the craft where it was trapped by a lip around the edge of the fuselage, forming the necessary ‘cushion of air’ to hover on.
Some of the airflow as also directed into two channels on either side of the craft to provide forward thrust, with manoeuvrability provided by two large vertical rudders. This airflow could also be redirected to reverse thrust for braking. The prototype SR.N1 was 29 feet long by 24 feet wide and weighed 6,600lb, but Cockerell was already planning hovercraft up to 10 times that size and capable of carrying commercially viable numbers of passengers and vehicles.
Just a few weeks later, on July 29th, the SR.N1 made its first successful crossing of the English Channel, travelling from Calais to Dover in just under two hours. In December that year Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the project at Cowes and went out on a test run. As an experienced naval officer and pilot, he persuaded chief test-pilot Commander Peter Lamb to let him take the controls, but flew the hovercraft so fast that he had to be asked to slow down. It was later discovered that a dish-shaped dent had been put in the bow due to hitting waves at excessive speed, but rather than repair the minor damage it was left and referred to as the “Royal Dent”.
Development work continue, with a major breakthrough being the addition of shaped rubber ‘skirts’ fixed to the vents around the fuselage edge. These extended the airflow vents and allowed the hovercraft to rise up higher from the surface and be less prone to damage or buffeting. By 1962 some small scale ferry services were under way, but the real commercial breakthrough came in 1968 with the launch of the four-engined SR.N4, which could carry 254 passengers and 30 cars, crossing the Channel in around 30 minutes.
By then rival firms were also operating, building their own hovercraft and special ‘hoverports’. Although the fast crossing could be rough and noisy, it was by far the most fashionable way to travel between France and England, with similar services soon established in other parts of the world. Over the years more than 80 million passengers and 12 million cars crossed the Channel by hovercraft, but the service steadily declined thanks to faster and cheaper ferries, the rising cost of fuel for the hovercrafts’ powerful aero engines, and the 1994 opening of the Channel Tunnel.
Today the only commercial hovercraft service in the UK operates between mainland England and the Isle of Wight, but the RNLI still operates a small fleet of hovercraft lifeboats. Technological advances have also made small personal hovercraft viable, allowing a band of dedicated enthusiasts to buy or build and pilot their own hovercraft over land and water.