Schwan 1

> There's an entire novel or sitcom episode to be had here about a bureaucracy that's completely paralyzed by trying to handle anything it doesn't have a written and approved procedure for. In the 1950s [Christopher Cockerell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Cockerell#Hovercraft) ran into this with his new-fangled "hovercraft" thingy; the private sector weren't interested (boat-builders thought it was an aircraft; aviation firms thought it was a boat), so he approached the government, who helpfully classified it as a defense secret but didn't fund it. Some years later news of foreigners working along the same lines *finally* unfroze the deadlock: Cockerell got funding via the National Research Development Corporation (a British nearly-DARPA arms-length government body that was ended in the 1970s) who paid for Saunders-Roe to build the [SR.N1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR.N1) -- the first human-carrying hovercraft, which crossed the English Channel in 1959. Anyway, the hovercraft *nearly* perished from bureaucracy, just like the Schwan.