The craft, called Wing-In-Ground-Effect or wingboat, may sound like a contraption from Jules Verne but it is tried and tested: seagulls use the effect to rest their wings by gliding over the water, and Moscow spent millions using it to make transports during the Cold War.

Now, with high fuel prices and overcrowded airports, the time of the wingboat has come. The French Government has awarded a £300,000 prize to Focus 21, a Marseilles company that is developing the Aéroptère, as it calls the future transport.

Despite its 19th-century-sounding name, the Aéroptère is a high-tech venture with industrial backing. Building on experience by the Russians, Americans and Australians, Focus 21 intends to have a prototype flying within three years.

“This technology is going to be taken up. It is inevitable with fuel costs soaring,” Eric Magré, the founder and chief of Focus 21, said. “It will provide transport that is half the cost of an aircraft to operate and it goes up to five times faster than a fast boat.”

One advantage of the ground-effect craft is that it will operate out of ports and come under maritime, not aviation, regulations, which makes for much simpler operation than aircraft.

M Magré, 40, a naval architect and aircraft designer, sees his craft as ideal for the 120-mile (190km) run between Corsica and the French mainland or across the Channel. It may blaze a trail for low-flying vessels of several thousand tonnes, which could skim oceans with containers, vehicles and passengers. M Magré said: “We are working with courier companies that are interested because this would enable them to reduce the cost very sharply compared with air freight while keeping a high speed.”

People used to make similar predictions for hovercraft, the lumbering air-cushion vehicles that were pioneered by Britain in the 1960s, served the Channel for two decades but never fulfilled expectations. Hydrofoils and other highspeed watercraft were also hailed as transport of the future.

Unlike hovercraft, wingboats are relatively quiet and do not bounce on waves. They move at least twice the speed and with less power, not by blasting air downwards inside a skirt but deriving lift like standard aircraft, on stubby little wings. These exploit ground effect, the zone of highly efficient lift that birds use and which pilots feel briefly before landing and after take-off. On its only flight, in 1947, the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s giant wooden seaplane, was never able to lift out of ground effect.

The Russians pioneered wingboats in the 1970s and 1980s. Their Ekranoplans flew on the Volga River, over the frozen Siberian tundra and the sea. In the 1970s US intelligence were puzzled by a vast hybrid boat-aircraft that spy satellites spotted at a factory at the closed city of Gorki. The heavily armed craft, which they dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster, weighed 550 tonnes (550,000kg) and flew at 300mph at up to 60 feet from the surface.

US defence concerns and commercial companies have invested in recent years in projects for big wingboats. The Phantom Works bureau of the Boeing corporation is developing the Pelican, a transporter of 2,000 tonnes that could carry 200 shipping containers at 250 knots. Boeing believes that in 20 years there will be a “mid-market” between ships and aircraft for such transoceanic transport.

Several Russian firms are looking for customers and finance for small Ekranoplans developed from the old military versions. The first commercial wingboat is the four-tonne Australian FS-8 Flightship, which carries eight passengers at about 100 knots.

One Aéroptère breakthrough is a system for deflecting thrust downwards to help the take-off, which is performed by accelerating on the water like a traditional seaplane. After lifting off, much less power than for either a fast boat or aircraft is needed to keep the wingboat flying. The finished TransAquatis craft will cruise at up to about 10 feet above the surface, above the waves on ferry routes except in storms, M Magré said.

Smaller craft may also be exposed in rough seas, although larger craft will ride comfortably above the waves. Birds can also prove a hazard, getting caught in the engines of this low-flying aircraft.

Some sceptics remain doubtful that the market is there for wingboat technology to be used on more than smaller craft. Engines and the engineering for giant commercial craft have yet to be developed, but M Magré calls this merely a gap that will be soon be bridged.

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