Navee – a Chinese mobility brand that's probably best known for e-scooters like the ST3 Pro and UT5 Ultra X and electric dirt bikes such as the Storm X Pro, but also has golf carts and exoskeletons in its ecosystem – just adapted one of the Cold War's strangest engineering ideas into a personal watercraft that is part aircraft, part boat. The Suzhou-based company unveiled its WaveFly 5X at Lake Taihu on June 5, calling it the world's first wing-in-ground effect (WIG) vehicle for everyday consumers.
WIG flight works in ways that defy instinct. The first pilots who noticed the effect probably didn't know what to call it. Somewhere close to the water – a few dozen feet at most – the aircraft started behaving strangely. It felt more stable. It needed less throttle, and it seemed almost reluctant to descend. What they were feeling was ground effect, the aerodynamic cushion created when a wing flies close enough to a surface that the air compressing between them generates extra lift.
That discovery mostly stayed a curiosity until the 1960s, when a Soviet engineer named Rostislav Alekseev used it as the foundation for an entirely new kind of vehicle. Alekseev had already made his name designing hydrofoils – boats with underwater fins that lift the hull clear of the water at speed – but he'd hit a ceiling. Cavitation, the phenomenon where low pressure around the foil causes water to boil in tiny violent bubbles, caps the practical speed of a hydrofoil at around 96 km/h (60 mph). Ground effect, he figured, had no such limit.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary and secretive engineering programs of the Cold War. Alekseev's ekranoplans – from the Russian for "screen plane" – flew over the Caspian Sea at altitudes measured in meters, not thousands of feet. The largest, the KM prototype, stretched 92 m (302 ft) and weighed 540 tons. CIA analysts spotting it in satellite imagery in 1966 reportedly called it the Caspian Sea Monster.
The Soviet program eventually stalled under a combination of technical compromises, internal politics, and the collapse of the USSR itself. The ekranoplan became a footnote, a fascinating one, but a footnote nonetheless.
The Caspian Sea Monster's unlikely offspring
That strange Cold War design is the base for the WaveFly 5X. Navee is positioning its WIG as personal leisure and exploration transport; think lakes, calm rivers, and quiet coastal stretches. The company explicitly frames it as a personal mobility device that falls outside traditional transport categories. One or two passengers can cross a lake, river, or calm coastal stretch without a marina or a runway.
This craft uses a tandem dual-wing structure and an aerospace-grade carbon fiber fuselage. It tops out at 85 km/h (53 mph), carries a maximum payload of 140 kg (309 lb), and offers a range of up to 80 km (50 miles).
No timeline for a production version or regulatory approval pathway has been announced, but the market logic backing this bet is substantial. Morgan Stanley projects the global urban and low-altitude air mobility market will reach US$1 trillion by 2040, potentially scaling to $9 trillion by 2050. The Chinese government, via state news agency Xinhua, estimates China's domestic low-altitude economy alone will hit 2 trillion yuan (approximately $275 billion) by 2030.
"WaveFly 5X marks an important step in bringing water-based, low-altitude mobility for personal use," said Lu Jian, President of Navee. "We remain focused on building intelligent products that help people move and explore more freely."
That promise of free exploration, though, carries a real caveat: one person's freedom could become everyone else's headache unless Navee addresses the noise issue before commercialization. Video footage circulating online suggests the WaveFly 5X is loud, somewhere between a motorbike and a military drone. That's not a minor issue. If this craft reaches mass adoption on lakes and coastlines, the acoustic footprint could be significant, both for other users and for aquatic wildlife in environments where underwater noise pollution is already a documented problem.
WIG goes mainstream
For decades, WIG craft remained largely confined to military experiments, maritime regulations committees, and the occasional fringe engineering project. What was once a Cold War curiosity is starting to split into several distinct paths that go beyond passenger transport.
In Singapore, ST Engineering's AirFish 8 is the closest to actual passenger service. It is a 10-seat craft that skims 1 to 3 m (3 to 10 ft) above water at up to 100 knots (115 mph), with commercial operations between Singapore and Batam targeting the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.
In the US, startup Regent is developing the Viceroy Seaglider, an all-electric 12-passenger craft with a 20-m (65-ft) wingspan currently in sea trials in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. The company's 2026 test campaign goal is to transition the Viceroy from a boat that skims water on foils to an aircraft that flies above it, reaching a top speed of 290 km/h (180 mph) in full ground-effect mode.
Last week, Regent completed what it describes as the world's first production hub for WIG craft, a 20,900-sq-m (255,000-sq-ft) facility at 1 Seaglider Way in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, designed for end-to-end assembly of the Viceroy and its autonomous military variant, the Squire. The company has pre-orders from ferry and airline operators, with customer deliveries targeted from 2027.
And then there's the military angle. Iran operates the Bavar-2, a WIG designed primarily as a low-signature scout and patrol platform. The Bavar-2 is a small one‑ or two‑seat flying boat that skims just above the water at high speed, using night‑vision sensors and cameras to spot targets and feed data to Iran’s swarming fast‑boat and missile forces around the Strait of Hormuz.
Analysts and Iranian sources have long framed it as part of an asymmetric sea-denial toolkit that could, in theory, exploit its low radar signature to support surprise or saturation attacks in the chokepoint, but there is currently no open-source evidence that Bavar-2 has been used operationally in the 2026 US–Israel–Iran war.
The military interest in WIG extends well beyond Iran. Satellite imagery analyzed by Naval News has identified what appears to be a large Chinese military WIG craft under development, reportedly fitted with weapons hardpoints.
In the United States, DARPA spent three years studying a WIG transport concept called the Liberty Lifter, designed to move large payloads at low altitude across open ocean. In 2025, the agency chose not to build a full demonstrator, instead transitioning the research toward commercial development – a decision that illustrates both the genuine promise of WIG technology and the unresolved challenges that still stand between it and operational use.
Taken together, these projects suggest WIG technology has finally crossed a threshold. It is no longer a Cold War ghost or an engineer's thought experiment. It is becoming an industry, one with ferry operators placing pre-orders, militaries commissioning prototypes, and now a consumer brand selling the dream of skimming above a lake on a Sunday morning.
There's no official word on availability or pricing for the WaveFly 5X, but some sources are going with somewhere close to US$100,000.
Source: Navee via PR Newswire
