The world's largest hovercraft, carrying 418 passengers and 60 cars]]A Hovercraft, or Air-Cushion Vehicle (ACV), is an amphibious vehicle or craft, designed to travel over any sufficiently smooth surface - land or water - supported by a cushion of slowly moving, low-pressure air, ejected downwards against the surface close below it.HistoryIn the mid-1870s, the British engineer Sir Mark Daniel Webber built a number of ground effect machine test models based on his idea of using air betwe