Hovercraft tank

The hovercraft tank, officially the amphibious hovering tank, was a Soviet armoured vehicle concept designed in 1937 by a group of engineers at Moscow aircraft plant number 84 under the professor Vladimir Israilevich Levkov. It was meant to ride on a cushion of air rather than on tracks, which would have let it cross swamp, sand and water at speed. Its streamlined, welded steel hull followed the layout of Levkov's earlier L-1 hovercraft boat, and two aircraft engines were to drive two airscrews mounted in tunnels at the bow and stern. The design called for a crew of two and a single machine gun in a rotating turret. Only a one-quarter scale mockup was ever built at the end of 1937, and the project never went further; the reasons it was stopped are not recorded. The plant that designed it, a Khimki aircraft repair factory founded in 1932, is the origin of the Tashkent Mechanical Plant.