The Belarus was a shallow-draft river hydrofoil of Project 1709 with a capacity of 40 passengers, designed for small rivers with a guaranteed depth of 0.9 metres. It was developed by the Gorky bureau of Rostislav Alekseev and built at the Gomel Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Yard from 1966. [1]
Wings for shallow water
The Raketa (hydrofoil) and Meteor (hydrofoil) were designed for large rivers. Yet the country's network of navigable waterways consisted mainly of small rivers, where the depth did not allow a vessel with a conventional hydrofoil layout to operate. The Belarus solved this problem: the ship rode on shallow-submerged foils and could keep moving where the guaranteed depth was only ninety centimetres. [1][2]
Forty passengers was half the capacity of the Raketa, but that was enough for a small river: the ship linked district centres and villages that a larger vessel simply could not have reached. [1] By the mid-1960s the lead ship of the Belarus class was already operating on the upper Sozh, on the Gomel — Slavgorod line: draft on the foils was only 30 centimetres, and cruising speed reached 60 kilometres per hour. [2]
Sources
- spkfleet.ru — The ship Belarus (archive)
- newspaper.gomelhistory.by — Winged beauties (Gomelskaya Pravda, 18 July 1965)