I'll disagree on the simple fact that fuel costs will not remain stable
An aircraft burns more than 75% of its trip allotment of fuel just getting to altitude on shorter trips (500 miles or less). With a plane using on average 500 gallons of jet juice on that trip, if you saved 375 gallons by simply not climbing that high, on each trip, won't the savings overcome the initial setup costs in pretty short order?
Example: At an estimated 500 gallons used by a single flight, the cost in fuel alone is over $2000 using today's prices. In ten years, the cost could be double or triple that amount for the same trip. A Ground Effect aircraft that stays near ground level doesn't need to climb once it lifts off, riding a cushion of air. This is NOT a "Forced Air" system like hovercraft or the STVL aircraft nosacredcow describes, quite literally it's no different from any other aircraft but with shorter, deeper wings that are only effective in that ground effect domain possibly long enough to provide enough lift to 'jump' an unexpected obstacle for a limited distance. The cost savings from a conventional aircraft would be around 75% or $1500 off of that single flight. Multiply this by even one trip per day for a month and you've saved $45,000. Two trips a day over that same route or one round trip saves $90,000 or more. Eleven months of just that one route with one round trip per day saves $1,000,000 in fuel costs alone, almost totally disregarding other cost savings by not having to pressurize the cabin for high altitude or maintain expensive high-altitude life-saving equipment on board. It may even be possible that the rolling gear could be fixed in a partially-exposed manner which eliminates expensive and troublesome hydraulics for lifting and lowering that gear and offer a safety factor even beyond what conventional aircraft have to do in the event of engine failure. In other words, the cost of the vehicle itself could be significantly reduced over conventional aircraft.
When you consider that Amtrak runs dozens of trips a day on the NEC and additional dozens on other heavy-use corridors, if they used a concept like this, not only would they significantly undercut the costs and prices of the airlines on the same runs, they could conceivably be faster as they have less intersecting traffic to worry about at starting and ending points. At, say, 36 trips per day over the NEC, the cost saving could add up to $19,440,000 in one year. This is the GEV's biggest advantage.
