When it first skimmed the waters of the Caspian in 1966, the KM was the largest aircraft on earth. At 295 feet long, capable of flying with a total weight of 600 tons and operating at a cruising speed of 310 miles per hour, it was hardly a mock-up. At a glance the KM looks like it was made to fight Godzilla.
Deployed much later, in 1987, the Lun (a more contemporary behemoth) was an improvement over the previous model.
The Lun ekranoplan weighs 380 tons, has a 148-foot wingspan and can launch six anti-ship missiles from flight. Or rather, it could, before it was retired to a forlorn pier in southern Russia.
The ekranoplan is almost as much ship as it is airplane. It uses WIG - wing-in-ground effect, riding the cushion of air compressed between its wings and the surface below it.
A-90
Lun Class
KM - the Caspian Sea Monster
I was expecting more of 1QIKZ’s An-225 - now that is a huge super plane. But any day I get to talk about ekranoplans is a good one.
the mx3 tossed it’s trans only a few blocks from my place, and then luke left it in my driveway for a month, then moved it to my lawn so I could get things in/out of the garage and it sat in my grass for two more months until I got a notice from the town. somewhere in that timeframe I found him an SVT on CL that ended up being Sasquatch’s brother’s car and we negotiated a fair price for it and have since swapped on euro bumpers I had stashed.
