Why I bought a Hov Pod

Hov Pod received this letter from Alex. Alex's letter brought a smile to our face when we read it and here it is reproduced for you to read in its entirety. Take it away Alex...

To Reaction International Ltd
PO Box 617
Southampton
SO16 4XL

25th November 2004

To whom it may concern

1. Very difficult to get on and off of the trailer, two or three adults required to load or unload.
2. Extremely noisy. I received several noise complaints within an hour.
3. No consideration for safety; no rear fan blade guard so goodbye fingers if they get too close!
4. Constant “ploughing-in” on land and water. My friend and I were thrown off the hovercraft several times and hurt.
5. Hardly any steering control at all, at 30mph you would turn the rudder and nothing happened. It was uncontrollable!
6. The quality of build was untidy and rough; although designed for a marine environment, no stainless steel parts, just very rusty ones.
7. Only a single skin hull, when we stopped on the water we started to get water inside the hovercraft. Good job we had bailers!
8. No hull impact bumpers/protection whatsoever, if you stopped on the smallest of stones/rocks the floor was likely to crack open!
9. The seating was just a solid fibreglass hump that was very painful on the rear after ten minutes.
10. No engine housing, a very difficult pull starter that sometimes took seven or eight pulls to start.

1. Their brand new hovercrafts had second-hand car engines from scrap in, Shocking! Would you buy a new car with a second-hand engine?
2. Some of their hovercraft hulls are made in sections and then cut & shut together much like a car. This is illegal in the motor trade, so why stand for this unsafe practice when it comes to hovercrafting?
3. Safety was at the bottom of the spec. list, no rear fan blade guards were available because I was told it hinders airflow, hence less speed. I would rather go a couple of mph slower and feel confident that nothing will get caught in the fan.
4. When I asked about ploughing-in, they told me that all hovercraft plough in and that it's just something you have to put up with! I was not happy about that; ploughing-in is very dangerous.
5. Their factory was very unimpressive, a lack of organisation and no apparent quality control.
6. When I asked about how easy their hovercraft were to control, they told me that you would need to weight shift all the time to complete turns and that it would not be wise to stop on water!
7. I saw some hovercraft they were building for customers and was quite shocked at the shoddy build techniques and the way that the hulls were very messy and flimsy. The company had no professional hull making facilities whatsoever.
8. The staff told me that a customer of theirs had returned a hovercraft to them he brought because he had eleven noise complaints in two hours!
9. Obtaining spares and contacting the company is question was very difficult, they didn't answer phone calls, text messages, emails, faxes or letters. I soon gave up trying with them and looked elsewhere.