While working for a motorboat company, Christopher Cockerell began to consider the possibility of reducing the friction between the water and a boat by floating the vehicle on a cushion of air. This idea led him to invent the hovercraft, an amphibious vehicle that can hover above both water and land. The hovercraft's large fan directs air under the vehicle, inflating the flexible "skirt" and generating lift. The skirt not only prevents air from escaping but also allows the vehicle to clear obstacles. A proportion of fan-generated air is expelled at the back of the craft to generate thrust.

On December 12, 1955, Cockerell filed for his first hovercraft patent. Various earlier attempts had been made to build a hovercraft before his success. He was almost beaten to it by Colonel Melville W. Beardsley, who built a prototype for the U.S. Navy in 1959 and to whom Hovercraft Development Ltd. Had to pay a large sum for his U.S. patents. The SR-N1 model, demonstrated in the same year, was initially impractical because its hovering height of one foot caused problems when the waves were higher than two feet. The machine only became viable when it was fitted with a flexible skirt, devised by Denys Bliss. The skirt, made of nylon-reinforced rubber, enabled the hovercraft to cope with considerably higher seas.

The first passenger-carrying hovercraft was the Vickers VA-3, which operated along the North Ales coast. Cockerell, Edwin Gifford, and Don Robertson formed Hovertransport Ltd. in 1964 to operate a ferry across the Solent, between Southsea in Hampshire and Ryde in the Isle of Wight, but British Rail decided to buy the first craft--the SR-N4--for use as a cross-channel ferry. Six of them were built for that purpose, four of which were widened and two lengthened as well. The last two, which could carry sixty cars and more than four hundred passengers, continued to operate as cross-channel ferries until they were decommissioned in October, 2000, being unable to withstand competition from the Channel Tunnel and fast catamarans known as SeaCats. The SR-N6 went into service between Southsea and Ryde, carrying thirty-six passengers, and that route was still in use in the twenty-first century, operated by two 98-seater AP1-88s.

The hovercraft was more ingeniously exploited by the U.S. Navy, which retained its interest in its potential after Beardsley's work was superseded and Bell Aircraft began producing the craft under license from Saunders Roe. Hovercraft operated successfully in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War and were used as tank-landing craft in the Gulf War. Interest was also maintained in Japan, where a hovertrain was installed at Narita International Airport.

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