[marbs]

As a young child, one day at school we had to fill in a "travel to school" questionnaire. I remember finding it funny that one option was "hovercraft", when the only one applicable to me was "walk".

Years later, I lived on the edge of Southsea Common in Portsmouth, and would regularly walk past these hovercraft terminals. The hovercraft do make quite a roar, as the article says, but were always fun to watch. I especially enjoyed "take-off" (if that's the right term?) when they would slide back off the beach into the sea and do a 180 simultaneously.

They do like to advertise the Portsmouth hovercraft service as being "unique", and say that no where else has such a service. So it's interesting to read that hovercraft are being used for regular services elsewhere in the world, such as in Japan, "to deliver passengers straight to the doors of the airport terminal across the Oita Bay without the need for a quay or even a connecting bus." Clever!

Several times I got the hovercraft in Portsmouth across to the Isle of Wight. One time I recall seeing a group of school children, presumably on their way back home to the Isle of Wight after a day of school on the mainland, and it brought back memories of my childhood questionnaire. I guess that option wasn't quite so ridiculous after all.

[ben_w]

> One time I recall seeing a group of school children, presumably on their way back home to the Isle of Wight after a day of school on the mainland

Depending on when this was, I might have been one of those kids. Back in… 1995?[0] My school in Havant sent us there for a week to some activity centre whose name I forget, where I was knocked unconscious by a trampoline.

[0] Such a nerd that I am, the week containing Wednesday 29 March 1995, which I remember because of which episode of TNG my dad recorded for me to watch later.

[swores]

You've misread the type of children they saw - an awful lot of schools, like yours, did (do?) trips to Isle of Wight and that activity centre, but the comment you replied to was talking about seeing kids who lived on the IoW doing their daily (presumably) commute back from their school on the mainland.

[n4r9]

I know that PGS students sometimes travel over from the IoW, but is that mainly because it's one of the only private schools in the area? Do state school students make the journey as well?

[ginko]

>Such a nerd that I am, the week containing Wednesday 29 March 1995, which I remember because of which episode of TNG my dad recorded for me to watch later.

But TNG ended in 1994..

[ben_w]

UK air dates were about 3 years later than US air dates:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Play_(episode)

[Geisterde]

Sounds like a cool dad.

[simonh]

Not been on that one, but I did get the chance to do the channel crossing from Dover once in one of the big ones. That was fantastic. I’d seen them on TV but it didn’t prepare me for the visceral reaction of seeing these giant machines lift off and glide around. It really was like Thunderbirds in real life.

[4death4]

For people who live on boat-access islands in cold climates, hovercraft are a common way to get to school in the early winter and spring when the water isn’t navigable by either boat or snowmobile. Obviously kind of niche though.