It'll never get off the ground

A model of the first hovercraft - the SR-N1

The world's first commercial hovercraft, the SR-N1 was launched in 1959. It was thought to be the future of sea travel, and regular services were soon in operation across the English channel. An invention largely attributed to Sir Christopher Cockerell, the hovercraft caught the imagination of a lot of kids around my age. I even had a Corgi model in cast metal similar to the one in this picture (this is in fact an Airfix 1/72 model). I vividly remember the iconic white plastic air intake, and for me, the design ideas embodied by the hovercraft symbolised the future.

Sadly, due to increasing competition from other cross-channel services and the opening of the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar train services, the cross channel service between Dover and Calais closed in 2000. The only commercial service still running in the UK is from Southsea (Portsmouth) to Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

A mere decade later, while I was at Wellington Grammar School (now known as Ercall Wood Technology College) in Telford, I was a part of a team of schoolboys (it was then a boys only school) that designed and built a personal hovercraft. Building a fully functioning hovercraft was quite a feat of engineering for a group of 12 and 13 year olds. In fact it was visionary, and ahead of its time. Not many schools could take on such a project, and not many teachers at the time were thinking about the pedagogy of learning by making (constructionism).

Making a hovercraft caught our imagination. I can still remember the distinct odours of the glass fibre, rubber, glue and newly cut wood as we grappled with materials to construct our fabulous floating vehicle. Some of the other boys, (who I would like to think were less fortunate because their design and technology projects were not as interesting) laughed at us, and told us our creation would never get off the ground. But it did. It was designed to hover, not fly, and hover it did. We took it out into the upper playing field, and took turns riding it around, until the fuel ran out. With the help of our D and T teacher, and with a lot of perseverance we somehow made it work. No one laughed at us after that.

And that is the bottom line. Once you have an idea, you will need resources, the support of an expert, and a lot of perseverance to create something different, and make it work. Some will laugh at you, think you are strange and deride your efforts. But ultimately, you will have a great learning experience, developing transferable skills including problem solving, decision making, design thinking, and creativity.

Photo by Bill Abbott on Flickr


It'll never get off the ground by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.