ON THE APPLICATIONS OF AIR CUSHION TECHNOLOGY TO OVERLAND TRANSPORT.

Paper attempts to provide a general methodology for assessing the performance of three basic types of air cushion vehicle from technoeconomic viewpoints. Since the power consumption per unit transport producitivity (the product of payload and operating speed of the vheicle) is one of the fundamental measures of transport efficiency, it is used as a criterion to evaluate the performance of various types of air cushion vehicle on unprepared terrain. The relative merits of the self-propelled, fully air cushion supported vehicle and the conventional tracked vehicle in overland transport have been analysed previously, but in order to give a more complete picture some of the results obtained previously are also briefly described.