Many of those are over seas, so an ekranoplane would make sense, if you want to lower the energy output, but a tradition train won’t work for many cases.
Don’t get me started on the distances in Schipol: had too many race to catch tight connections at that airport…
Planes like this will most likely be used for routes from very small local airports to larger regional ones. I'd guess it's more likely to cover things like Rønne - Copenhagen, or Mariehamn - Helsinki.
I feel like we can make fast trains really worth it, but it makes the few connections I mentioned under-supported if you want to remain below a certain carbon footprint.
Can't they fly only over flat surface and very close to the ground?
That makes them quite unpractical in my opinion.
Ekranoplanes use the ground effect, which requires to be close to a flat surface, indeed, but the larger the place, the further you can be. Something the size of a 747 could be a couple dozen meters above the waves and fly smoothly above moderately rough sea.
I was looking at taking the Eurostar from London to Amsterdam, and a friend was dismissing it as it took 4 hours where as the flight is ~45 mins. Except its not, the flight its self maybe 45 mins, but you have to get to heathrow (which is further away than St Pancreas) plus get there an hour early. Then we would have to deal with Schiphol and getting to the center of Amsterdam. To me the prospect of spending 4 hours sat down on the train and arriving directly in central Amsterdam, all the while with more space than a plane is much better than the prospect of 4 hours of that.
Now obviously that's a very niche case, and for most people it doesn't make as much sense, but I think people get scared off by the long train times but ignore the extra time needed around the flight.
It’ll take less time to have operational electric passenger flights than it would to build a new high speed rail route. Particularly in the US (Europe is admittedly much better than the US in that regard).
