Science & technology | Marine technology

The AirFish is a fast ferry that will fly above the waves

It takes inspiration from the “Caspian Sea Monster”

AirFish Wing-in-Ground (WIG) craft.
Plane sailingPhotograph: ST Engineering

In the 1960s, during the height of the cold war, American spy satellites spotted an unusual stubby-winged craft at a Soviet naval base on the Caspian sea. Was it a boat, was it a plane? Dubbed the “Caspian Sea Monster”, it turned out to be a heavily armed naval craft some 100 metres long designed to attack submarines and aircraft carriers.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The sea monster returns”

Cash for kids: Why policies to boost birth rates don’t work

From the May 25th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Science & technology

How to reduce the risk of developing dementia

A healthy lifestyle can prevent or delay almost half of cases

GPT, Claude, Llama? How to tell which AI model is best

Beware model-makers marking their own homework


How America built an AI tool to predict Taliban attacks

“Raven Sentry” was a successful experiment in open-source intelligence


Gene-editing drugs are moving from lab to clinic at lightning speed

The promising treatments still face technical and economic hurdles, though

How Ukraine’s new tech foils Russian aerial attacks

It is pioneering acoustic detection, with surprising success

The deep sea is home to “dark oxygen”

Nodules on the seabed, rather than photosynthesis, are the source of the gas