Oita Hovercraft

Oita Hovercraft
大分空港海上アクセス
Locale	Oita, Japan
Fleet	Hovercraft
Owner	Oita prefecture
Operator	Oita Daiichi Hoverdrive
Operation will start	2024

Oita Hovercraft is a hovercraft service operating a 33-kilometre route between the city centre of Oita city and Oita airport scheduled to resume in 2024.^[1] The route is expected to become one of the two regular hovercraft services in the world, the other being the service between the Isle of Wight and Southsea in England.^[2]

Overview

The route was served by the Oita Hover Ferry company from 1971 to 2009, which operated hovercraft on the airport route as well as other tourist routes. When it ceased operations in 2009, its fleet consisted of four hovercraft built by Mitsui E&S.

Financial difficulties were the primary reason the hovercraft service had to be withdrawn. However, the bus route that replaced the service took more than one hour to get to the city centre from the airport, while hovercraft could connect these two places in just 25 minutes. This led the Governor of Oita, Katsusada Hirose, to decide on the resumption of the hover service in 2020.^[3]

As Mitsui E&S, the only Japanese builder of commercial hovercraft,^[4] had already stopped building them, the British hovercraft company Griffon Hoverwork Ltd, the only builder of such ships in the world, was commissioned to build a fleet of three ships. These three ships cost the prefecture approximately 4 billion yen in total (approximately £26 million using the exchange rate when the order was placed). The ships were based on those operated on the Isle of Wight routes, while being approximately two metres longer. The three ships were named Baien, Banri, and Tanso, each after a renowned scholar from Oita during the Edo period.^[5]