James May in the Ekranoplan

[bleesh]

Just seen this on the BBC web site - May is apparently flying in an Ekranoplan type plane (I guess not the real big Russian Ekranoplan, otherwise known as the Caspian Sea Monster), in the first episode of James May's Big Ideas series on BBC2 on Sunday night at 21:00.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7638659.stm

Radio Times review of the first episode..

The splendidly bufferish James May returns for what feels like a sequel to James May's 20th Century - i.e. him pottering about looking through a curtain of hair at cool bits of engineering. In this case, he's looking more to the future than the past, starting with personal transport and the vexed question: how can we design something to beat traffic-jam misery and get us from A to B without bumping into each other? His first answer is the wonderfully strange "ekranoplan" - a Russian sort-of-plane that flies very fast just above the ground. After that there's a Japanese strap-on helicopter ("That's rather excellent"), the 1950s aerocar ("That's most excellent") and the Harrier jump jet ("Genuinely uncanny"). He even has a go, very briefly, with a real-life rocket pack. You don't have to be a gadget nut to enjoy it, though it'll help if you like May. Then again, that's not hard.

Steve

Edited by bleesh on Saturday 27th September 18:26

[fadeaway]

Sky+'d and series linked

[kit80]

bufferish????

I love James May, will be watching. I almost touched his hair at MPH06

[Shaolin]

I saw a link to this somewhere else today and looked at some Ekranoplan vids on Youtube, they look great bits of kit, but all the vids I could find that had any narrative were in Russian (I think) or German. It's now on my list of toys I want.