The AirFish: Half Boat, Half Plane and Powered by a V8 Engine

It's basically a passenger aircraft that takes off from water and can only fly very low, a couple of feet off the surface. Engineers call it a wing-in-ground-effect aircraft or WIGE for short. We won't pretend to understand exactly how it works, but the idea is that that if the aircraft flies at a distance similar to the wingspan, drag is reduced and there's more lift.

The Russians pushed the idea to new extremes with their Ekranoplans, gigantic aircraft the size of ships that were supposed to carry hundreds of soldiers in order to invade the US. The biggest was something like 550 tons.

The AirFigh serves no such nasty purpose, but it does come with a General Motors V8 engine that pushes two propellers. Because the AirFish flies so low, it's classed as a vessel so it doesn't even require a pilot's permit.

"If this is such an awesome aircraft, why are the videos all blurry. It must be a hoax!" we hear you say. That's not the case, it's just that the footage is really old. From what we've been able to gather, production of the all-composite aircraft started in January 2003 after sea trials verified the design. But the company's 100 employees only managed to make three aircraft of which only one was complete by the time the firm had to sell its assents in 2004 due to lack of funding.

The 8 or 10-seat aircraft was aimed at coastal passenger and freight services and had already received interest from Asia, Canada, the Maldives and the Middle East. As you'd expect, eccentric rich people liked it. Flightship had in addition designed a larger twin-turboprop variant, dubbed the Dragon Clipper.