So, its for drug smuggling, then?

The Russians played around with this sort of design a lot during the cold war. They never really got satisfactory results.

See "Ekranoplan"

Ultimately the program was scrapped because there were too many limitations on how the vehicles could operate.

Nah, this flying boat's too visible on radar. The smugglers are going to be running this baby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJCQKuMq3vY

This is cool in a couple ways.

This is hilarious in all the wrong ways.

*music

Adding video to channels (Music) - requested by ant.

Yep,

What once was old is new again! This tech has been around for decades.

Here is a Lun-class Ekranoplan on the Caspian Sea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_symWK4T7n0

I can only guess those are nuke rated missiles it is firing.

8 nacels, the things HP must have been huge.

To be fair, what I thought is new is the cheaper motor running on regular unleaded gas more efficiently. Airplane fuel is insanely expensive compared to gas, and harder to get in remote places.
Ground effects plane/boats have been around for quite some time, but not in a commercially useful configuration. This seems like a big step up from small ferries or tour boats (faster and smoother rides) and far cheaper than small planes to buy and operate.

Yeah, the biggest ecranoplan was enormous, with immense lifting capacity but little evasive capacity, so they were awful in practice as military vehicles except as transports well behind the front. I can't find any instances of them being used in conflicts.

I always upvote cool looking things, but I can see a rogue wave causing some issues with it's flight path.

This is in Spanish but...even a stealth boat is too much radar profile.
That's why: snorkel using submersibles (in Spanish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqYoif-9c64

You know, there aren't any waves on the desert. I'm saying it's time for landspeeders.

http://www.91x.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/land.jpg