ARTY FACTS
It was around this time ~ during February of 2022 in the interregnum between the HGV classroom course and driver training in Ancoats ~ I felt it was time to donate at least a portion of the body of my art to posterity, by way of one museum or another. We have seen how the Hiller Museum in Silicon Valley had just missed out on the prototype that we’d travelled there with, not least because of the effort that would be involved in flying it back with us. Stripped of its essentials like something of an organ donor, therefore, it was passed on to a member of another of the teams at the GoFly Challenge and now as a consequence hangs from the ceiling of a warehouse in Los Angeles. It could be that if this were all to take off, the guy might have the equivalent of the original Mac hanging up there and readily saleable on eBay. And if so, good luck to him I say!
For the two-third scale prototype that had successfully flown during the previous December I elected to donate it to the Helicopter Museum in Weston-super-Mare in the south of England. This private collection begun effectively by just one man who’d been associated with the industry for many years was by then the foremost collection of rotary-winged craft in the world, and included the original helicopter built by an Austrian by the name of Raoul Hefner. He had exported his skills to the UK, Austrians no doubt feeling like most others at the time that there would be little use for such things. The one which most impressed me however was the Whirlwind from Queen Elisabeth’s ‘Royal Flight’, which he’d acquired for the princely sum of around fifty thousand pounds.
When you consider that a twin-turbine helicopter of this sort would cost many millions of dollars to replace and yet this one ~ resplendent in Royal colours ~ had been knocked down to a bargain-basement level. Thing though about helicopters, like many other forms of transport, is that they tend to evolve to ever higher stakes and are thus prohibitively costly to run and maintain once removed from their habitual domain. It was a reason that I liked the reductio ad absurdum of personal air vehicles, now that they could be put together by dummies like me. Until recently they had been just to difficult for anyone but the decided enthusiast to contemplate, chiefly because the only option for powering them was the internal combustion engine… and one as often as not derived from elsewhere (like lawn-mowers). It was thus like, for instance, trying to build a car from scratch, instead of simply referring to the classified ads and buying a used one.
In truth then it would be a lot easier to assemble a collection of helicopters than you might have thought. Not a few of them had been used on film-sets, having come to the end of their natural life. And what use would a studio have for them thereafter, given they took up rather mores shelf-space than an R2D2. One form of transport that always appealed to me from the point of view of being lived-out was the hot-air balloon, which have to be furloughed after a while because their fabric deteriorates under everyday UV radiation. There were lots of things you could do with a balloon I figured, as indeed you could with one of those giant cooling towers, by way of a last hurrah.
For my prototype’s last hurrah, however, it would be a life in perpetuity within the Helicopter Museum. The curator had ideally wanted something from Vertical Aerospace, but then beggars could not be choosers I figured. The important thing was, and here was a natural soul-mate of mine, there was an electrical revolution taking place in aviation that anyone visiting most museums would be wholly unaware of. This to a great extent is a British thing, we like nothing more than revelling in the past rather than contemplating a glorious future. It was the mistake that our short-tenured Prime Minister in the shape of Liz Truss had made… betting the farm on a techno-future in a country that relies for its well-being principally upon global financial corruption on the one hand, and buy-to-let renovations (and TV series to accompany them) on the other. We once revolutionised industry, but those doing so generally then upped sticks and moved their kids to the capital, where over successive generations they would invest in property and inflate the economy in order that they could enjoy a comfortable retirement, or that their off-spring would never be tasked with anything as materially constructive ever again.
One week later therefore I would visit another monument to a glorious aviation past, except located in the North of England. The irony is in all of this that in the UK it is a good deal easier to obtain funding for a museum than it is say for a personal air vehicle that some people at least view as a reasonable proposition, and that could be developed (if not certified) in a fraction of the time and budget associated with any other program. Prior to Liz Truss it was probably Boris Johnson who is PM best exemplified our ‘bull-dog’ spirit, but his principal adviser (and the architect of Brexit) viewed the country’s aircraft-carrier as a vainglorious piece of show-boating more likely to be sunk during the next asymmetric conflict than not… a sort of floating World Trade Center.
All of that said, however, I do love a good transport museum and this one was the sort that just put it out there for what it was. Whilst night-stopping at Teesside Airport as aircrew I had visited a local museum that contained what is practically the first steam locomotive anywhere in the world, and marvelled at material substitutions from a time when there would have been decidedly little choice: most notably the use of leather for seals, when even rubber would have been absent from the world and let alone plastic.
Another reason for having selected the South Yorks Aircraft Museum was that it was located in Doncaster, a place I’d travel to on a rail warrant before decanting to RAF Finningley for a weekend of flying training. It’s own airport had long gone, having been landscaped for the inevitable smorgasbord of duck-ponds, crap statuary and shopping centres. In one corner of what once had been, however, there remains the hangars and in them the museum’s collection… amongst them the back-up prototype to that left in amongst the inventory in Weston. This one to would hang from the rafters adjacent a parked Bell 47 of the sort I used to watch crop-spraying as a kid (and whose chemical exposure likely led to the current fixation with building a flying phone-box).
What needed to be done now, however, with these scale prototypes safely tucked up, was there scaling-up… at least in mock-up form for the essential look-and-feel prior to cutting metal. This required the exercise of imagination in itself. For motors I used a set of foam-planters from a flower-arranging website, for each battery a shrink-wrapped length of timber and for propellers the fascia-board you’d see on uPVC conservatories so beloved of the your neighbours and mine. Thus rendered it would be sufficient for studio shots for the PR push at least, but more importantly it would allow me to sit in it. Sat as it turned out on a £9 folding chair from IKEA, which I can recommend for its levity if not its crash-protection.
This would be an invaluable exercise, for it revealed if nothing else that all eVTOLs with propellers located on the underside are a potential death-trap requiring a relatively complicated ~ and heavy ~ form of protection for the inhabitant. Beside this, all else being equal in a power-off free-fall such aircraft would eventually fall to earth inverted, along with that same inhabitant. Above all, once scaled up to adult size it neither felt right sat with me sitting on it, nor looked right from the photo of me doing so from the visit to the studio. And one had to be ever wary of public perception, the C5 electrical three-wheeler having sunk the reputation of Sir Clive Sinclair. It was not so much the fact that it was powered by a washing-machine motor that would not have captivated the fans of Fast and Furious, say, but that you looked a bit silly whilst motoring along the road in it. This last aspect was only worsened by the addition of a flag-pole with a pennant atop it that the average motorist my spot prior to squashing it like road-kill. If anything, this made it look as much a moving target for golfers as a means of mobility.
Accordingly this meant ultimately that I would dismantle the mock-up and shift it to the recycling bin, in a way that say Van Gogh would periodically trash his paintings if not cut his ear off and send it to his beloved. (Tip to teenage readers, incidentally, a box of chocolates is altogether the better choice from either point of view.) In truth this left me in the Slough of Despond, and this from a man who survived office life in the Slough of Berkshire… and in fact whose office appeared had appeared in the opening frames of Ricky Gervais’ eponymous TV comedy. As a consequence, and to the detriment of a blog in our always-on world in which we all either thrive or die (and nothing in-between) on social media, very little would happen for many months afterward. At least drone-wise.
I’d walked out of the first trucking job ~ a sugar-rush experience which most of us only sensibly dream of ~ and landed a second, dropping food cages at branches of Tesco at what I considered to be a plain silly hour of day. This was an eye-opener in itself, as I came to realise that the entire logistics industry in the UK is staffed with cheap labour from Eastern European (and I mean cheap only in the fiduciary sense), along with bored old men like myself. I would leave there having been told, when delicately suggesting like Niles Crane to a large Irishman that he may have been parked in a Loading Bay, that I go fuck myself. I thanked him for his wise counsel, and never darkened Tesco’s door again.
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| Mothercare to museum... |
