SeaPhantom : Helicopter Speed At A Powerboat Price

The boat you see here is a 30-foot concept from designer David Borman. He has designed and developed it to be the efficient future of transport. “That Wally powerboat, which I think is $20 million for the 50 footer, it sucks down something like 2,000 gallons of fuel an hour and it only does 70mph. I’ll be using less than a tenth of that amount of fuel going twice as fast.”
?

Fast boats have their appeal, but hard pounding and massive fuel consumption would leave them useless as practical maritime surface transport - nor much fun for our landlubber friends. Maritime Flight Dynamics’ solution is to fly just above the wave crests, on proprietary shock dampened ‘foils’. Literally, a boat with a full-functioning suspension system, similar in capability to Baja desert racers. A lifting-body airfoil design carries the craft above the sea surface in ground effect, radically reducing hydrodynamic drag. This requires less power and uses a fraction of the fuel consumption.

Many of the new breed of high-performance boats can travel at triple-digit speeds over the water.?objective is to make this kind of speed practical, safe, comfortable and efficient - ultimately to make maritime transport a viable alternative to our crowded skies and highways. Imagine: direct travel, city centre to city centre, directly from one waterfront downtown to another; faster than the taxi ride to and from your local airport. To render the ‘Blue Highways’ vision of many municipalities a reality. And in the meantime, have a lot of fun doing it! To stretch the imagination to its wildest limits and to create one of the ocean’s most advanced power craft concepts to date…

“My tag line is: helicopter speed at a powerboat price. It’s the ultimate status symbol, but it’s got a practical side too. I love the Bahamas, love the Tortugas, but they’re between 130 and 200 miles from here in Miami. If I were to have a conventional yacht that could only do 25mph and I’ve got a 3-day weekend with the kids, I might as well forget it. By the time I got there it’d be time to turn around and come back home. Scale up to a 64 footer Sea Phantom and you’d literally be able to cross the Gulf of Mexico with impunity. It would cruise at 150mph, you’d have room for several staterooms, and you could walk around in the wings. It would be fast enough to run from Key West to Cuba in 20 minutes, when Cuba opens up. It would literally.

Link & Image : seaphantom

Receive latest Post in your mobile