if I'm not mistaken so are Sweden testing such a system for large container ships.
Most sail boats from the Viking Age (you know how the Viking use their boats) was built in that way that it collects air under the hull so that they could sail faster, and many of the Norwegian tradition sailing boats (in Norway) uses the same method today. (And kind of boats I have built even!)
(size exaggerated a bit: but this boat can come up in 30 meters!)
And if I do not remember wrong we have a Norwegian engineer down in Greece, where he is testing a similar system that Canadians, just for planing single hull that can do more than 35 knots.
So this is nothing new for me.