REVIEW: It's Christmas, which means it's time for a special edition road test! This year, join matty_prior aboard the excellent Griffon Hoverwork 12000TD
Buy a ‘ticket to Ryde’ in Southsea and you’ll walk through a waiting area and onto a concrete pad, so things feel more like an old airport departure lounge than a ferry terminal. And that’s fitting, because a hovercraft owes as much to the aerospace industry as it does to marine engineering. For the first few decades of the machine’s existence, operations were even governed by the Civil Aviation Authority rather than maritime authorities.
The 12000TD sits somewhere between those two extremes. It has an aluminium hull, which is flat underneath and 5mm thick. Overall, the craft is 22m long and nearly 13m wide. It has two MAN V12 diesel engines mounted longitudinally and sitting side by side at the rear, driving four fans between them, by belt, with no clutches. Two fans pull air into the skirt, with fixed blades, so the higher the engine revs, the greater the amount of air that goes into it. At a cruise, the hull is between 1.
Behind the storage area is a six-rung ladder that takes you up to a four-seat wheelhouse, with a seat either side of the floor access hatch and two more up front. The rudders can be controlled two different ways, but each does the same thing. There’s an aluminium bar on the floor, which is Attrill’s preferred way to steer the craft “because it leaves a hand free”, but some pilots prefer to use the joystick to their right. Either way, in what could be a useful lesson to automotive designers sticking everything on a touchscreen, there’s an invaluable number of big, clear physical buttons abounding in the 12000TD’s wheelhouse.
That leaves two-thirds of power for propulsion. In good conditions, this means up to 45 knots – or 52mph in land terms. Certainly, conditions on our October test day couldn’t have been better, especially given that it’s the worst month for storms and cancellations. Even so, Attrill is making constant adjustments to our direction. The big rudders, four on each side, are angled 17deg from vertical, which helps create some roll, which increases drag on the inside to help the craft turn.
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