How a ship that glides like a pelican could change travel and defense

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — The winged passenger ferry gliding over the surface of Narragansett Bay could be a new method of coastal transportation or a new kind of warship.

Its maker, Regent Craft, is betting on both.

Twelve quietly buzzing propellers line the 65-foot wingspan of Paladin, a sleek ship with an airplane’s nose. It looks nothing like the sailboats and fishing trawlers it speeds past through New England’s largest estuary.

“We had this vision five years ago for a seaglider — something that is as fast as an aircraft and as easy to drive as a boat,” said CEO Billy Thalheimer, jubilant after an hours-long test run of the new vessel.

On a cloudy August morning, Thalheimer sat in the Paladin’s cockpit and, for the first time, took control of his company’s prototype craft to test its hydrofoils. The electric-powered watercraft has three modes — float, foil and fly.

From the dock, it sets off like any motorized boat. Farther away from land, it rises up on hydrofoils — the same kind used by sailing ships that compete in America’s Cup. The foils enable it to travel more than 50 miles per hour — and about a person’s height — above the bay.

What makes this vessel so unusual is that it’s designed to soar about 30 feet above the water at up to 180 miles per hour — a feat that hasn’t quite happened yet, with the first trial flights off Rhode Island’s seacoast planned for the end of summer or early fall.

If successful, the Paladin will coast on a cushion of air over Rhode Island Sound, lifting with the same “ground effect” that pelicans, cormorants and other birds use to conserve energy as they swiftly glide over the sea. It could zoom to New York City — which takes at least three hours by train and longer on traffic-clogged freeways — in just an hour.

As it works to prove its seaworthiness to the U.S. Coast Guard and other regulators around the world, Regent is already lining up future customers for commercial ferry routes around Florida, Hawaii, Japan and the Persian Gulf.

Regent is also working with the U.S. Marines to repurpose the same vessels for island-hopping troops in the Pacific. Those vessels would likely trade electric battery power for jet fuel to cover longer journeys.

With backing from influential investors including Peter Thiel and Mark Cuban, Thalheimer says he’s trying to use new technology to revive the “comfort and refined nature” of 1930s-era flying boats that were popular in aviation’s golden age before they were eclipsed by commercial airlines.

This time, Thalheimer added, they’re safer, quieter and emission-free.

“I thought they made travel easier in a way that made total sense to me,” Cuban said by email this week. “It’s hard to travel around water for short distances. It’s expensive and a hassle. Regent can solve this problem and make that travel fun, easy and efficient.”

Co-founders and friends Thalheimer, a skilled sailor, and chief technology officer Mike Klinker, who grew up lobster fishing, met while both were freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later worked together at Boeing. They started Regent in 2020.

They’ve already tested and flown a smaller model. But the much bigger, 12-passenger Paladin — prototype of a product line called Viceroy — began foil testing this summer after years of engineering research and development. A manufacturing facility is under construction nearby, with the vessels set to carry passengers by 2027.

The International Maritime Organization classifies “wing-in-ground-effect” vehicles such as Regent’s as ships, not aircraft. But a database of civilian ships kept by the London-based organization lists only six around the world, all of them built before it issued new safety guidance on such craft in 2018 following revisions sought by China, France and Russia.

The IMO says it treats them as marine vessels because they operate in the vicinity of other watercraft and must use the same rules for avoiding collisions. The Coast Guard takes a similar approach.

“You drive it like a boat,” Thalheimer said. “If there’s any traffic on the harbor, you’ll see it on the screen. If you see a boat, you’d go around it. We’re never flying over boats or anything like that.”

One of the biggest technical challenges in Regent’s design is the shift from foiling to flying. Hydrofoils are fast for a seafaring vessel, but far slower than the speeds needed to lift a conventional airplane from a runway.

That’s where air blown by the 12 propellers comes in, effectively tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds.

All of this has worked perfectly on the computer simulations at Regent’s headquarters in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. The next step is testing it over the water.

For decades, the only warship known to mimic such a ground-effect design was the Soviet Union’s hulking ekranoplan, which was built to fly under radar detection but never widely used. Recently, however, social media images of an apparent Chinese military ekranoplan have caught the attention of naval experts amid increasingly tense international disputes in the South China Sea.

Regent has capitalized on those concerns, pitching its gliders to the U.S. government as a new method for carrying troops and cargo across island chains in the Indo-Pacific region. It could also do clandestine intelligence collection, anti-submarine warfare and be a “mothership” for small drones, autonomous watercraft or medical evacuations, said Tom Huntley, head of Regent’s government relations and defense division.

They fly below radar and above sonar, which makes them “really hard to see,” Huntley said.

While the U.S. military has shown increasing interest, questions remain about their detectability, as well as their stability in various sea states and wind conditions, and their “cost at scale beyond a few prototypes and maintainability,” said retired U.S. Navy Capt. Paul S. Schmitt, an associate research professor at the Naval War College, across the bay in Newport, Rhode Island.

Schmitt, who has seen Paladin from afar while sailing, said he also has questions about what kind of military mission would fit Regent’s “relatively short range and small transport capacity.”

The possibilities that most excite Cuban and other Regent backers are commercial.

Driving Interstate 95 through all the cities that span Florida’s Atlantic Coast can take the better part of a day, which is one reason why Regent is pitching Miami as a hub for its coastal ferry trips.

The Viceroy seagliders can already carry more passengers than the typical seaplane or helicopter, but a growing number of electric hydrofoil startups, such as Sweden’s Candela and California-based Navier, are trying to stake out ferry routes around the world.

Thalheimer sees his vehicles as more of a complement than a competitor to electric hydrofoils that can’t travel as fast, since they will all use the same docks and charging infrastructure but could specialize in different trip lengths.