Dwarfing all previous flying giants, the Pelican, a high-capacity cargo plane concept currently being studied by Boeing Phantom Works, would stretch more than the length of a U.S. football field and have a wingspan of 500 feet and a wing area of more than an acre. It would have almost twice the external dimensions of the world’s current largest aircraft, the Russian An225, and could transport five times its payload, up to 1,400 tons of cargo.
Designed primarily for long-range, transoceanic transport, the Pelican would fly as low as 20 feet above the sea, taking advantage of an aerodynamic phenomenon that reduces drag and fuel burn.
http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2002/september/i_pw.html
And that's the problem with communism: Things just didn't “work” - People were slaves to the handouts. And the handouts were controlled by the bureaucrats - who didn't care about the actual results - only the “rules”. And maintaining their power and their salaries from the ever-higher bureaucrats.
And today's democrats and their slavish professors see no problems with that.
But, for ground effects, the power/fuel/weight does work out much better than helicopters, better than hydrofoils for ocean surfaces under modest waves, and adequate - though not stellar - when compared to regular airplanes carrying far less cargo.
Ping to the resurrection of the Caspian Sea Monster.
Soviet jet engines, turbines, and turbofans were notorious fuel guzzlers. The best case for the aircraft was as a fast troop transport and as a way to launch salvoes of guided missiles at US and NATO naval vessels when they were clustered in a carrier task force. I think that what eventually killed the project was that in addition to cost and limited value, the Soviets no doubt realized that the look down, shoot down radars being deployed by the US in the late 1980s would deprive the LUN of the element of surprise and make it exceptionally vulnerable.