AMES HIGH
It is worth an overview of the GoFly Challenge, if only because nothing quite like it looks set to take place again any time soon in a post-pandemic world. Whilst set to continue in 2022 and with Boeing’s million dollar prize apparently still on the table ~ for whoever can take off and land vertically and fly a fourteen-stone operator around a half-mile course for twenty minutes with a ten-minute reserve remaining ~ the proceedings are now confined to video footage rather than taking place at a gathering. Whether progress with battery performance will allow for those performance stipulations to be met though is something that most of the people in the business do not consider possible within the twelve month time-frame that is likely now to be allowed, although teams like DragonAir in Florida appear to have been close to that sort of flight duration many months ago.
Why that apparent progress has not been reflected in capturing the prize already is something of a mystery, although it could be that Mariah, their stalwart pilot, is wholly lighter than the required ninety kilo payload as indeed the footage of her in the bikini would suggest. The eVTOL arena however, much like the not-too-distant Area 51, is beset with mysteries of one sort or another. I remain in contact with an email pen-friend in San Diego called Morty (am guessing short for Mortimer) as a result of one such mystery involving someone going by the moniker ‘HeroFlyer’ on YouTube. Footage from several years ago now and over two or three videos appears to show a series of successful flights in a form of ‘flying wheelie-bin’ not unlike one of our own prototypes built during the course of ongoing development. Except subsequently he (and it) appear to have sunk without trace.
In fact I contacted Morty because he and I were among the few filing comments, and we came to the same gory conclusion: that the guy had either died or been seriously injured by a fall ~ like Icarus himself ~ from a great height. Had that footage been included on the channel then it might have gone a long way to reinforce the reservations Aled had had about the whole notion of scaling drones up in order to carry people. For the fact remains that few if any of the people developing such machines are truly cognisant of the dangers, in the way that few if any people with a smartphone have the first inkling of how it actually works.
We have seen how temperamental the flight controllers can be, and in fact the market leader in the mass-produced sphere has long been DJI, for precisely the reason that they nailed the problem of making these dubiously reliable components hang together long enough for anyone to be able to fly their quadcopters. This was a not inconsiderable achievement, for prior to this they had been about as durable as RC helicopters that spent much of their time crashing into flower-beds. It is no mistake that Aled’s own background would have been RC helicopters, as most professionals latching on to the growing drone industry were drawn from this background… and they new precisely how parlous each and every flight was as a result.
Few teams building mega-sized drones able to lift their own body-weight are apprised of the risks, however. Success in aviation is measured in thousands or millions of hours measured across any number of research centres and subsequently real-world fleets. As a consequence of that, I spent much of my life flying airliners with an engine in the form of the CFM-56 that has since been called the most reliable machine ever to have been produced by human-kind. But here’s the point: on its introduction it was anything but, pitching passengers on the Boeing 737 into the M1 motorway in the UK at Kegworth and into a field some place in the US. The aviation business however proceeds by statistical analysis and investigation in order to iron out glitches large and small, whereas those who are building drones are as often as not strangers to these same methods and means that have evolved over more than a century. It is as if we were sending primary school children to a day at the rifle-range without prior knowledge or preamble.
Helicopters, for instance, are to date the only consistently reliable means of vertical flight. This is for the simple reason that they are effectively powered gliders, in so far as they evolved from the gyrocopter, which in turn is basically an enlarged and motorised form of sycamore seed. Given an engine failure they can simply glide (or ‘autoroate’) down to ground level. Drones however rely upon multiple redundancy channels i.e. a motor (and speed controller and all else) for every one that might fail. The best way to describe this is to say that it is much like having a spare engine in the boot of your car that runs concurrently with the one up front in case either should fail. The only reason that this is at all economically viable in electrical flying machines is that the cost of the components required has literally plummeted over recent years in line with every other electronic good.
A quadcopter itself is not at all redundant therefore, being about so as much as the chair you are sitting on losing one of its four legs. The reason we do not here of many deaths or injuries stemming from these things is a combination of their extraordinary reliability combined with the fact they are mostly operated over open ground, along with the fact that accidents and incidents are barely if ever reported. Beside the statistical analysis and investigation facilities open to the use of say airliners, there is a global army of aircrew constantly trained and persuaded to report every possible variation in the performance of the aerial equipment they use on a daily basis. This as you can imagine is almost totally absent from electrical flight at whichever level, although there are notable exceptions… but these are in turn funded by billionaires and have the leisure and means to imitate these so-called Safety Management Systems (or SMS).
It is true therefore that the development of eVTOL types in reprising the development of powered flight itself from over a century earlier, which for people like me with nothing better to do has to be quite exciting. This in turn was precisely the founding principal of the GoFly Challenge, to recreate those early prizes that meant that whole populations were enthused by men (generally) in white scarves in their ‘magnificent flying machines’. In truth the numbers were swelled at the time by the fact that there was little else to do at weekends beside football, dancing or sex… but no matter, and once confronted with these super-sized drones in the air I have seen at first hand how enthused the bulk of us are. Childhood fantasies invariably revolve around stuff that flies, as Steven Spielberg has repeatedly demonstrated, and even Freud himself felt that such dreams stemmed from our most basic sexual urges. With all that said, however, let us return to the event at NASA Ames itself in the early spring of 2020, for as the great motorcycling speedster Burt Munro said: “It’s the man in the arena that counts.”
Turning back to the challenge however and reviewing those twenty-odd projects which appeared at the event, a cursory search on the internet reveals that very few exist any longer, or at least in the form in which they were presented. And that includes our own, although the DNA is still visible in what we have as of the time of writing. A few have sustained efforts in the field but do so only in aspirational form (principally PR renders), whilst at least one team (the eventual winner of the Disruptor Prize) have a replacement prototype, albeit altogether different from that succeeding at the event itself. Others like Trek Aerospace were in the business of VTOL long prior and continue with pursuit of the day job (specifically ducted fans in this case). A few other teams meanwhile were formed for the challenge with one particular outline and continue with loosely-related research of various kinds in similar fields. Only one however entry still appears to be working on that vehicle which was displayed, and with an up-to-date website to suit (Garudeus). On balance then, given that TELEDRONE has an updated and all-singing-and-dancing site on which there is a large-scale flying prototype that clearly employs the same parts and techniques as previously seen… then I feel we are not doing too badly.
From what I recall the following day subsequent to the briefing (and a perusal of the exhibition facilities) was spent near the coast at the airfield called Half Moon Bay, and it was here that a variety of flying machines were assembled quite literally for preliminary testing and inspection by the FAA. The inspectors if nothing else were personally impressed by the simplicity of the basic layout of the quadcopter attaching the top of the passenger compartment, but then so were we. Although it had originated so far as I could tell from a German technical university a few years prior, I had at least come to the same conclusion independently. It would be true to say that on this day the only single entry to fly ‘out of the box’ was DragonAir’s octocopter, and it was probably no coincidence that it was this one alone that had any sort of track record, or at least so far as could be gleaned from YouTube. And even this would crash on the day due failure of an electrical speed controller ~ an occupational hazard among the flight-testing of such prototypes. If nothing else though, the weather was as nice as you might expect of California in late February.
Meanwhile we would miss out on Saturday’s subsequent Press Day back at the Ames facility, which to a great extent the reason for our being here. This day was spent in the absence of Marvin, who if you recall had left us at the altar rail a few days previously, meant that we no longer had either a licensed drone pilot not anyone who knew precisely how the hardware and software were set up, and not least the password to the laptop (which in fairness I found a record of in the aftermath). To compound the problem the time difference between the West Coast of the USA and the UK meant that at around the time when we needed crucial information, he had long since gone to bed. The spirit of Alcock and Brown, you’d be forgiven for thinking not…
Instead we’d to rely on the good offices of two drone pilots belonging to other teams, one of which had also dropped out at short notice. The one remaining however was tied up at the Press Day understandably, such that our day at Half Moon was somewhat a glorious waste of time. As people however who had spent many more days hanging around at airfields as all good pilots have, however, this was nothing entirely new. It was toward the end of this day however that we would eventually persuade Ben to accompany us in a search for a suitable test-site, which we located in a park at the southernmost extremity of San Fransisco Bay. Baylands Park, to be precise.
Ben wanted ideally to check the parameters on the laptop prior to flight (see lack of password above) and thus it was that the flight would result in an early oscillatory spin of the sort previously described, and a topple onto the grass that destroyed any number of propellers. Ben, who as an alumni of M.I.T. and someone therefore who could be expected to know, figured that the most likely cause had been a compass calibration problem stemming from the fact that the machine had been transported half way around the globe since it last flew, a consideration that might have been complicated by my own decision to omit a GPS feed that might have corrected the machine’s erroneous world-view to an extent sufficient to avoid disaster… Or maybe not.
All in all then something of a pisser and I can only apologise to Ben for my mood on the day and thank him for his efforts. For on top of all else, the bulk of RC pilots operate using the throttle at the left hand and sidestick at the right and Marvin, of reasons best known to himself, used the converse method. This meant that Ben had also to grapple with what was effectively a steering wheel on the wrong side; but then in view of all else this was merely the cherry on the horse-shit.
The mood was lightened however by the public reception at the concluding Open Day on the Sunday afterward, which took place on the day (following a rare Leap Day that had been chosen for its associated auguries). The notion of a phone-box that might transport people from one neighbourhood location to another appealed to both a generation that had been raised on Star Trek and Doctor Who, but also moreso to any number of kids who wanted to be photographed sat therein. It was also the only entry that would appear on the front page of the local newspaper in Mountain View, which is altogether more impressive when you consider it being the local rag for any number of employees of companies like Apple, Microsoft, Zoom, Google and so on and so forth: in fact dollar billionaires were as thick on the ground here as Teslas.
In fact Mountain View was not at all a bad place to live, I figured, not least for the breakfasts at Crepevine and evening meals at Ephesus. At the close of Sunday therefore it felt very much like an end-of-term at a boarding school, not that I ever went to one. On the following day too there was a personal bucket-list trip to Hearst Castle, we having already done the haunted house in San Jose that featured in the film ‘The Winchester House’ that I had seen half-way around the globe in Cambodia whilst still working as an airline pilot. And so the trip, if only for the personal connections and PR, had been a qualified success. We had surely been, momentarily at least, among ‘Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines’. And women, who had bested the rest of us when it came to flying such machines beside organising a flying circus.
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| "Get me out of here." |
