It's Wing In Ground; I think it's because ground effect does happen when a regular plane flies close to a surface, but this craft is designed so that it's optimized specifically to keep the wing in the ground effect, or at least that's how I think of it.

International Maritime Organization

https://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Safety/Pages/WIG.aspx#:~:text=WIG%20craft%20is%20a%20multimodal,which%20are%20intended%20to%20utilize

Wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle

I'm in Ontario, Canada. We have a lock system with a lot of shipping from the Atlantic, and the Great Lakes. My thought is that it might be possible to use WIG in specific narrowly defined use cases: a large cargo WIG drone could in theory move goods faster and more efficiently than cargo ships; it would be slower than a regular plane but again, much more efficient because the engine doesn't need to provide any lift.

I live fairly near to an airport on the lake, and I have some bushland up North fairly near to another airport on a lake. I was wondering if I were to build a drone or a ship, and I kept it under 400 ft at all times and 95% of the time within say a wingspan or two of the surface of the water, if I'd piss off the air traffic controllers. I wouldn't fly anywhere near the airport from my perspective. I think you answered my question!

I do think if I built it, it would need a maritime transponder of some kind but I have to look into that; in either case, both airports would be accustomed to regular maritime traffic, I expect this would be no different from their perspective, but I was a little bit concerned about the potential of upsetting the military.

Thanks