Summer course on Ground Effect!

In 2000, a bunch of aeronautical engineering students in Toulouse met in the local Euroavia office (https://euroavia.eu/) and came up with the idea of organizing a major event to boost their activity and re-connect with the rest of the network.
They were crazy enough to agree on organizing an ambitious event gathering the main actors of the ground effect flying ship field.

Soon K. V. Rozhdestvensky and the Aquaglide team agreed, followed by the late Hanno Fischer and Gunther Jörg. Edwin van Opstal and Graham Taylor jumped in the (flying) boat – they had the best lineup possible!
Supported by SUPAERO, Air France, Dassault, AKKA Technologies, AGF, Verdié and AAAF, these young students had no choice but to organize the event, which was held in one of the main amphitheatre of SUPAERO – now ISAE-SUPAERO, in June 2001.

This would be the last time all these great engineers would be together. Yet this week of meetings and parties with students from all over Europe would prove a success.

Today (2025) flying ships are now appreciated for their frugality and versatility, and numerous projects are announced. Some excellent youtubers also created interesting concepts. Time to look back and enjoy some knowledge sharing from the fathers of the technology!

Stéphan AUBIN was one of the organizers of the event back then, and is now an active member of SSG AERO, especially in the ground effect field. It sounded like a good idea to gather and share all we could, and found out that most of the videos from the conferences were in good conditions, and could be digitized!

So each week we'll publish one or two video here and share it with our community on LinkedIn.
These videos are very rich material from the fathers of the technology, and are very relevant today!

We are sure you'll appreciate them as well as we did!