EAGLE Takeoff

Hi Friends!

Hope you’re doing well. Today’s blog is going to take you into a different aspect of my unique life: innovation, research, and development. Earlier today in Sydney, Australia, an idea that could revolutionize #Travel as we know it was presented at the 35^th Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS 2026). The idea, an Ecofriendly Airborne Global Luxury Ekranoplan (or EAGLE for short), was developed by my Opa, Dr. Mithra Sankrithi, and until today, largely kept under wraps, except for a select few at RIC Enterprises and Georgia Tech University’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) working on it, me included.

Image courtesy of RIC Enterprises

So, what is EAGLE exactly? Great question. Think of an awesome giant flying cruise-ship with a revolutionary design that has zero-carbon-emissions (thanks Hydrogen) and serves most of the major ports around the world! In the image above, for size reference, that’s a 747 above Eagle and a cruise ship below. It’s HUGE! It’s also an ekranoplan, which means it flies low above the water (or land) and uses the wing-in-ground-effect (WIG) to be super-efficient. This effect is really cool! See the supergraphic below to see how it works!

Supergraphic designed with ChatGPT

In the early stages of R&D (Research & Development), I worked on researching GDP and tourism metrics at places around the world and extrapolated those into the future. I also investigated existing flight data, distance data, and demand and revenue models to help design some routes that motivated some of the ideas and round-the-world paths you’ll see in the more detailed presentation below. The work I did with my dad and grandpa was then scaled up and analyzed through Georgia Tech’s ASDL. Check out the concept of operations YouTube video below to see EAGLE in action, traveling all over the world!

https://youtu.be/ktbv1xMEAqM?si=gq3CMgO0rQeHRhtt

Before sharing more details about EAGLE, let me share the origin story of the name! On a cold winter evening in a hotel in Vancouver, WA, enroute to picking up a new Pearl contrabass flute along with my dad and grandpa, we came up with the name EAGLE for this project. It was an awesome ideation session. We thought of words most associated with the project and acronyms that would be most appropriate. We started with Ecofriendly Ekranoplan so thought of words that start and end with E, a code for our secret group working on this visionary project. Then it hit us, EAGLE, how perfect! It's patriotic, it's an incredible flying bird, and a symbol of innovation in aviation. I came up with Global because this thing is going to connect the world! Dad came up with Luxury because it is modeled after the cruise ship experience. Then we had EGLE, getting closer but what about the A?... Aha! Airborne! That's the story of how the name EAGLE was born!

Note that though a lot of work and ideating has already gone into EAGLE, it remains a preliminary design and requires a lot more R&D and funding support to become a reality, so this is just the beginning! For those interested in far more technical details, check out the full ICAS 2026 presentation here.

Without going into technical details, here are a few highlights of EAGLE compared to the commercial airplanes and cruise ships you’re more familiar with. Its cruise speed will be around 260mph, roughly half a commercial airplane and ten times a cruise ship. Its capacity will be around 50,000 passengers, more than the capacity of Major League Baseball stadiums, roughly 100x that of a jumbo jet and 10x that of a cruise ship. Again, this is all still in concept phase, and a ton of work will still need to be done for this to bring major future benefits to passenger and cargo transport combining the best features of airliners and ships. How cool would it be to see this happen, and how cool to know I played a small part?! Huge shoutout too to Oma, Mom, and Vivaan for always supporting our crazy projects! If you want to reach out to the team at RIC Enterprises working on this, their email is ricenterprisesinvent@gmail.com.

That’s all for today! See y’all next time! Sarang out.