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"  The experimental French trimaran Hydropt\u00E8re has a footprint the size of a basketball court and a 100-foot-high carbon-fiber mast that can fly 6000 square feet of sail\u2014made variously of carbon, Kevlar, and Cuben fiber\u2014yet there&amp;#039;s not much room aboard. There&amp;#039;s barely even a deck, just a scrim of netting that stretches between the narrow center hull and two pontoons. I hunker down next to the bowsprit, which I&amp;#039;m told is the best place to soak up the action away from the spray that&amp;#039;s thrown by Hydropt\u00E8re&amp;#039;s two underwater wings, one under each pontoon. Hydropt\u00E8re is a hydrofoil: Half plane, half boat, and it doesn&amp;#039;t just sail\u2014it flies. With any luck, those wings will take Hydropt\u00E8re across an ocean. It requires a crew of four to man the boat. The co-skipper, Jacques Vincent, has his hands on the wheel. Two tr\u00E8s c\u00E9l\u00E8bre sailors, Jean Le Cam and Yves Parlier, share duties on the lines. Alain Th\u00E9bault, the boat&amp;#039;s owner and designer, directs. I&amp;#039;m just a stowaway, along for a practice run in San Francisco Bay. Parlier turns the winch, the mainsheet snaps tight, and we start to accelerate, fast. We easily outrun the speedboat chasing us, and at 12 knots (almost 14 mph), the entire boat starts to climb up onto its hydrofoils, no longer floating, but flying. When it&amp;#039;s flying, Hydropt\u00E8re has all the insectoid grace of a praying mantis, with elbows out and arms akimbo. The trick to getting the boat speeding is reducing drag. So, when it flies, only the tips of the boat are in the soak: the end of the rudder and the lower halves of the two bladelike foils. Getting Hydropt\u00E8re aloft is simply a matter of catching a breeze; the foils do the rest, turning the force of water streaming around them into lift, just as an airplane&amp;#039;s wings do in air. But flying the boat can get a bit tricky. Even though there are sensors all over\u2014a total of 30\u2014there are no readouts; the data are logged for post-sail analysis. Offshore sailing is almost entirely dependent on gut instinct and good reflexes. The crew must meet every gust with fine-tuned sail-trim adjustments to keep the boat from getting overpowered and pushed into a heel strong enough to pop one of the foils out of the water. That is the hydrofoiling equivalent of an airplane losing a wing, and it can easily result in a capsize. There&amp;#039;s a &amp;quot;Jesus button&amp;quot; at the foot of the ship&amp;#039;s wheel that the skipper can stomp on at any time to depower the sails in a hurry. As soon as we&amp;#039;re cruising, Th\u00E9bault grabs me by the wrist, leads me amidships, where there is a joystick beside the captain&amp;#039;s chair. It controls the rudder, a vertical fin with a horizontal stabilizer that controls the boat&amp;#039;s pitch. By tweaking the pitch of the boat, the skipper can adjust the angle of attack of the foils in front. The smaller the angle of attack, the less lift; more angle means more lift. So not only does the stick control the boat&amp;#039;s pitch, it also controls its altitude. &amp;quot;Like an airplane!&amp;quot; I exclaim. Th\u00E9bault throws his arms wide and smiles even wider: &amp;quot;Like a magic carpet!&amp;quot; Later that afternoon, Hydropt\u00E8re hits 37.5 knots, setting a new sailboat speed record for San Francisco waters. The only boats in the bay that can beat it are the giant foiling catamarans\u2014which hit speeds of around 40 knots\u2014in the America&amp;#039;s Cup races. Hydropt\u00E8re&amp;#039;s top sustained speed is 50 knots, a world record when the boat set it in 2009 (the record is now held by Sailrocket 2, which hit 65.45 in 2012). Hydropt\u00E8re&amp;#039;s top speed ever\u2014an instantaneous reading from GPS\u2014was 56 knots, at which point it tripped over its foils and capsized. That&amp;#039;s comparable to crashing into a wall at 65 mph on land\u2014without seatbelts. The Hydropt\u00E8re crew spent most of the summer in Los Angeles, preparing to sail to Honolulu along one of the major transits in the world of offshore racing, the Transpac. The current record for the 2225-nautical-mile route is 115 hours, but by the time you read this Hydropt\u00E8re may have shaved off as much as a day from that record. Conditions will have to be just right: calm seas, with the wind blowing between 20 and 25 knots the entire time, day and night. The rest is dependent on the skill of the sailors. Beyond just sailing, they also must dodge ocean debris; the last time Hydropt\u00E8re tried to conquer an ocean (the Atlantic, seven years ago), it hit a sea turtle the size of a VW Beetle and shattered a foil. By the end of summer one of two things will have happened. Hydropt\u00E8re will have made it to Hawaii, beating the Transpac record, or, scenario two: Hydropt\u00E8re itself will have been beaten and maybe even sunk, somewhere in the mid-Pacific. Either way, Hydropt\u00E8re&amp;#039;s run to Honolulu is a swan song, a last sail. After flying, crashing, and chasing records for nearly two decades, Hydropt\u00E8re is near retirement. But Th\u00E9bault promises he will sail again. He&amp;#039;s got Hydropt\u00E8re 2 on the drawing board. It will foil just like the old bird\u2014only faster.  Sinelab "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a9400/how-to-make-a-sailboat-fly-15890011/>