The increasingly inevitable saturation of the terrestrial infrastructures (airports, roads…) push to use the seas as soon as that is possible, but in the other hand, the technological limits prevent from reaching sufficient speeds on water which could make the current solutions (High Speed Craft for example) sufficiently attractive even competitive.

The phenomenon of ground effect has already been known since the early days of aviation and a lot of pilots have experimented it, voluntary or not.

During the cold war, the Soviet Union built the firsts really operational WIG crafts and remained secret until the perestroika. These projects led to technological demonstrators like KM and industrial production machines like ORLYONOK that had cruising speeds of between 400 and 500 km/h on water surface with particularly important payloads. We can today affirm that there exists a technology which makes it possible to conceive maritime means of transport, definitely faster than the current ships at high speed, more comfortable, definitely less expensive than the planes and surer while respecting the environment.

This opinion is taken into account by the world community and in particular since 2002, when IMO (International Maritime Organization) published the first recommendations on the ships with ground effect, then giving them an official existence on a world level.