Building a flying sailboat: Foiling Laser design, engineering, and testing [video]

Lasers are small, fast, 1-man, racing dinghy sailboats. They are designed to get up on plane quickly and skim across the water surface, but are somewhat unstable and require constant athletic effort by the sailor to keep them stable, pointed in the right direction, and sailing optimally.

Modifying one into an even more unstable hydrofoil is no trivial endeavor. But it is of small enough scale it can be attempted by a single naval architecture grad student in his home workshop.

This vlog goes through several design->build->test iterations here, solving problems such as changing the center of gravity and forces acting on the boat, structural (over)stress, etc. Still a work in progress, but it's been done before and is known to be possible. This is just the first vlog of the process of doing it that I've seen.