Hovercraft are ideal for flat muddy rivers like Nebraska’s Platte, or the Connecticut River, where the Enfield, Connecticut fire department uses their Hovertechnics hovercraft for rescues on the river. Here the California Department of Water Resources operates a Neoteric for fishery restoration programs. Or the edge of estuaries, for example, like parts of the Sacramento River Delta, where it is too shallow for boats, and changing tides can leave vessels stranded. Here the search and rescue team of Hill Air Force Base’s Utah Test and Training Range has two Neoteric hovercraft, used for accessing remote crash sites. In the mud flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah, for example, distances are great, and surface conditions are often too soft for wheels (or even feet), and too hard for boats. And their niche is places that you can’t get to by any other means. They are finding their way into their niche. Or Neoteric, of Terre Haute, Indiana, which has supplied craft of its design to the Border Patrol, and many other state and municipal agencies, and private companies. There are several companies in the United States making small quantities of hovercraft for commercial, recreational, and search and rescue functions, such as Hovertechnics of Eau Claire, Michigan, which has delivered over a thousand of its craft to customers since opening in 1984. Small commercially made hovercraft however do exist, and they do seem to work. Or science fantasy, like the hovercraft made as a Saturday project, perhaps from plans that were advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine, that never really seem to work as well as expected. Small hovercraft, however, seem more of a science fiction kind of thing, like the little sport model Luke Skywalker drives across the desert in Star Wars (in reality an actor driving a small hovercraft). They seem to work OK when they are big, heavily powered, and headed in a relatively straight line. ![]() FOR MOST PEOPLE, PRACTICAL HOVERCRAFT are large water-borne vessels carrying hundreds of people across European waterways (like the English Channel) at high speeds, or Marine Corps equipment carriers that can discharge troops in vehicles the second they land on the beach (like those based at Camp Pendleton, on the coast north of San Diego County).
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