On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water.

Two people were on board. Neither of them was a pilot. They were captains, because the thing they were driving is legally a boat.

That last detail is not a technicality. It is the entire business model, and it is why a company called REGENT may succeed where six decades of far more spectacular machines failed.

Why flying low is cheating, in a good way

Every wing trails vortices off its tips, and those vortices are where a large slice of an aircraft’s drag comes from. Fly close enough to a surface and the ground physically interrupts them. Induced drag collapses. Efficiency jumps.

Pilots meet this every time they land, in the form of an aeroplane that refuses to stop floating just above the runway. Ground effect is the reason.

The idea of exploiting it deliberately is old, and the Soviet Union pursued it hardest. Rostislav Alexeev’s ekranoplans skimmed the Caspian at hundreds of kilometres an hour, and the Lun-class served the Soviet and Russian navies from 1987 into the late 1990s.

They were magnificent and they were impractical. A craft that must stay within a wingspan of the surface cannot climb over a wave, cannot easily turn, and cannot operate in a seaway. The Soviets never solved it. Neither did anyone else.

The hydrofoil is the actual invention

REGENT’s contribution is not the flying. It is the bit before the flying.

The Viceroy leaves the dock floating on its hull like any other boat. As it accelerates it rises onto hydrofoils, lifting the hull clear of the chop. Only once it is foiling, stable and fast, does it transition to flight.

That sequence solves the problem that killed the ekranoplan. Hydrofoils tolerate waves and manoeuvre in harbours, so the craft can operate from an ordinary quayside in ordinary conditions instead of needing a flat calm and a long clear run.

The Viceroy prototype rising onto its hydrofoils during earlier low-speed foil testing.

Thirty seconds that took five and a half years

By aviation standards the flight itself was modest: 596 metres, ten metres up, half a minute. By the standards of a category of vehicle that has never reached commercial service anywhere, it was the whole point.

The company says the summer was spent pushing hydrofoiling speed higher and higher until flight was simply the next step on the curve rather than a leap. Chief technology officer Mike Klinker framed the result in terms of what it unlocks.

Regulated as a boat, which changes everything

Certifying a novel passenger aircraft with the FAA or EASA is a decade-long, nine-figure ordeal. It is the wall that most electric aviation startups eventually hit.

Because the seaglider never leaves ground effect and never operates over land, it falls under maritime rules. In the United States that means the Coast Guard, and crews hold mariner certificates rather than pilot licences. Elsewhere it means national maritime authorities.

Whether that regulatory route proves as quick in practice as it looks on paper is the open question. Carrying fare-paying passengers at 180 mph ten metres above the water is not something maritime regulators have had to think about before, and a novel craft tends to generate novel rulemaking.

Passengers, or the Marines?

The commercial pitch is coastal: about 40 per cent of the world’s population lives near a coast, and a seaglider uses existing port infrastructure rather than an airport, so there is no runway to build and no airport security queue to stand in.

The defence pitch may arrive sooner. REGENT holds a 15 million dollar contract with the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and a cooperative research agreement with U.S. Special Operations Command, and it has already flown an uncrewed seaglider drone called Squire. A fast, low, quiet craft that moves cargo or casualties between islands without needing an airstrip is an obvious fit for Pacific logistics.

Squire, REGENT’s autonomous seaglider drone, during a defence flight demonstration.

Thirty seconds in ground effect does not make a transport system. There is a long flight-test campaign, a production ramp and a regulatory framework still to come. But every previous attempt at this failed before it got a paying customer, and none of them had hydrofoils. For the first time in sixty years, the idea looks like it might actually float.

REGENT’s own footage of the Viceroy’s first crewed flight on 2 September 2026.

Sources: REGENT Craft press release of 2 September 2026, Aviation Week, Aviation International News, New Atlas, gCaptain, FLYING Magazine, AeroTime, aeroTELEGRAPH.