China has built a huge aircraft-boat hybrid, dubbed the ‘Bohai Sea Monster’, that can fly under radar and outmanouvre battleships.
Using a design used by the Soviets in a classified Cold War-era megaproject, the craft has been captured on camera for the first time.
The colossal ground-effect vehicle (GEV), known as an ekranoplan in the Russian military, is a four-jet craft designed to fly at ultra-low altitudes, skimming the water surface, for transporting troops.
Designed to combine features from aeroplanes, ships and hovercraft, an ekranoplane was previously deployed by the Soviet Union as a warship in the Caspian Sea from 1987 to the late 1990s.
It is understood that alongside Russia, the United States, Germany, Canada, Japan, Taiwan and China have developed smaller GEV models, with the latter making an extensive effort to expand its naval capabilities.
The GEV’s ability to travel at such extremely low altitudes improves its chances of bypassing enemy radar systems while also outpacing ships.
Images shared across Chinese social media disclosed the Bohai Sea Monster’s existence with the British Royal Navy’s Naval News outlet confirming its suspicions that the grey-painted aircraft in the background is a GEV.
However, China has yet to officially confirm the vehicle’s existence, meaning, despite being referred to as the Bohai Sea Monster, its official name, designation and manufacture are still unknown.
Modern GEVs have opted for smaller builds but the recently-snapped Chinese model seems to be a throwback in this regard.
The images depict the flying boat hull with a T-tail arrangement and two vertical stabilisers, as well as a relatively short wingspan and large tail, typical of Ekranoplans.
There is a mystique to the craft’s design, owing largely to predecessors such as the more than 300ft long, Soviet Union-built, Caspian Sea Monster, which was developed during the 1960s, eventually becoming the largest and heaviest aircraft in the world in 1966 until 1988.
The Caspian Sea Monster, known also as KM, crashed due to pilot error during a test flight in 1980 but had left US intelligence perplexed about its purpose after first being discovered by Cold War spy planes.
The Lun-class ekranoplan was retrieved from the Caspian Sea in 2020, after lying dormant for more than three decades, before being transported to a beach in Dagestan, for preservation, later becoming a tourist attraction.
