Monday, March 15, 2010

Hydroptere & Moth Class, flying not floating


www.hydroptere.com

The Hydroptère project is not limited to the performance of the 60-feet trimaran which has beaten two world speed records at an average speed of over 50 knots in 2009 in the Mediterranean. Today, l’Hydroptère is in a shipyard in Lorient (France) and she should be back in the water in spring.

Alain Thébault (the only living Icarus among the oceanic skippers) and his team decided to extend the limits of the project and planned to develop two new boats, with the ultimate objective of sailing around the world in approximately 40 days on l’Hydroptère maxi.

To reach this objective, the team with the assistance of some retired engineers (the 'papés') and of their scientific adviser (The Swiss Technological Institute in Lausanne), decided to follow the same experimental process as that employed by Alain Thébault in the development of l’Hydroptère and to consider an intermediate step, that being to build on a reduced scale a test model i.e. l’Hydroptère.ch.
l’Hydroptère.ch will be used as a lab boat for testing geometries and behaviours in varied real conditions before starting the development of l’Hydroptère maxi.
As a Swiss-French project l’Hydroptère.ch which should be launched beginning of summer 2010 is being built in two shipyards, one in Brittany and one in Switzerland.

In the same time, some other
hydrofoil flying boats are training in Dubaï with the need to burn themselves to every suns before the start of 2010 Puma Moth Worlds.

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