One of the longtime dreams of the military is the development of a flying vehicle which could also act as a submarine. Research has gone on for many years and as of yet we don’t seem to have anything that will function this way, or at least we don’t know about anything like this with the exception of what I mentioned at the end of this article. During World War II the Soviet Union had decided to build a flying submarine and as hard as they worked on the problem, they couldn’t get it out of the design stage. The requirements for submarines and airplanes are very different. A submarine needs heavy construction to withstand water pressure and the deeper you want it to dive, the heavier the construction needs to be and at a certain point, depending how deep you want the submarine to be able to dive and still be able to fly, you have to settle. By this I mean you will never get anything which will even meet minimum standards of performance using today’s technology. It will turn out to be a lousy airplane and a lousy submarine. In 1937 a submarine was designed by the Soviet Union which would have been merely a seaplane which could dive under the water. The project did get as far as passing a review of the draft by a scientific committee, but it was sent to be reviewed again and this time it didn’t make it and was canceled.

Other countries were also interested in developing a flying submarine. We have to remember it was only around 1920 when the first countries began thinking about this and if they could’ve perfected it, it would’ve been undetectable at the time. A project to build such a flying submarine was suggested by leaders in the United Kingdom, but it never saw the light of day. One might’ve thought the country which had the best chance of perfecting a flying submarine would have been Nazi Germany. The reason I suggest this is the fact they had come out with so many super weapons at the time which were at least a decade ahead of anything anybody else had. Their secret was they had put most of their engineers and scientists into one place named Peenemunde and allowed them to share information with each other, which is the exact opposite of what we do in this country since everything is compartmentalized and nobody is told anything unless there is a need to know. This has the effect of slowing down a project and not getting the benefit of everybody’s thinking. Perhaps this is why many of our multibillion-dollar weapons are defective.

It turned out the Nazis were working on a flying submarine and the plans were discovered by the Royal Navy when they went into a factory. The flying submarine was designated V12. The idea seemed to be to weld wings onto a watertight hull. The plans which were discovered were in the form of blueprints. There were notes attached to these blueprints which suggested developing this flying submarine was not going to be easy and would probably take time and time was something Nazi Germany was running out of. The thinking was the flying submarine wouldn’t be ready for World War II, but might be ready for the next war. When the Germans realized they were not going to be able to develop the flying submarine for this war they decided they were going to use a new technology they had developed and that was sea launched missiles. It is hard to believe that in the 1940s the Germans would be capable of such a thing, but they were. The idea was to tow canisters behind snorkel submarines. These canisters would be submerged and when they were towed to their destinations they would float to the top, flip up and launch their missiles. They were being developed specifically to be used against the United States and it is lucky for us the Germans had so many other projects keeping them busy so they were only able to order one such canister. American escort carriers was sent out to find German submarines and make sure the one with the canister never had a chance to launch.

The Japanese had a different take on building a flying submarine. They believed it was more advantageous to build a submersible aircraft carrier which could then surface and launch its planes. The Japanese actually built these carriers and used them. The most famous type was the I–400. This submarine carried three airplanes. The idea was for the submarine aircraft carrier to surface, launch its planes and then dive. It had the range to go anywhere in the world and return. Originally there was supposed to be 18 of these boats built, but the amount kept getting scaled back until finally only three were created. The idea was the brainchild of Admiral Yamamoto, who was the commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. He wanted to take the war to the United States mainland and saw these submarine aircraft carriers as the way to do it. The submarines had an aircraft hangar on the deck and of course everything was waterproof. The planes were float planes and there was a crane on the submarine which was used to retrieve them.

In 2008 DARPA announced a plan to build a flying submarine in the United States. The plan called for a stealth type aircraft which could fly low over the water, set down on the water and transform into a submarine. One engineer said a few years ago the plan would’ve seemed very silly, but he no longer felt that way today. One of the biggest problems of designing a flying submarine is the fact you must protect the pilot, so much of the equipment and the design will be meant to perform this function, but if there is no pilot things could be different. It is now believed we have accomplished the task of building a flying submarine, but there is no pilot to worry about since this flying submarine is a drone. The prototype was known as Flimmer. This name was picked because it is short for Flying Swimmer. It is said to look like a small submarine with wings attached. The specifications as to speed are not that stunning, but we have to start somewhere and it is said that Flimmer can achieve a speed of 58 miles power in the air and 12 mph submerged.

Once the need for heavy metal to shield a flying submarine from see pressure is eliminated then we might find every plane in the sky will be capable of flying into the ocean. If we can develop some sort of a plasma shield or bubble shield everybody will be building these things.