The Groves of Pandeme
It would have been Tuesday 3rd of March in 2020 therefore that we packed our bags and prepared to come home, and it was that same week that a cruise-liner was held off San Fransisco due to an outbreak of a viral infection of increasing concern: Covid-19. I remember in fact listening to the radio on the drive back from Marvin’s ~ repeated drives which cost me in excess of £1000 alone ~ and hearing that this was the name that had finally been given to the mystery outbreak first identified in Wuhan toward the close of the previous year.
The weekend would see the death of my mother-in-law from unrelated causes, leaving me to spend the greater portion of the lockdowns resulting from the pandemic entirely on my own… and I’m crying softly into my cornflakes here. As a result, the project to a great degree became my only friend. This is something that many men can probably relate to, and especially those in sheds. Without the fine tuning in communications available to the fairer sex ~ and I’m not talking trannies here, delightful as they are ~ many men actually prefer artificial physical constructs to natural. I think the reason for this is that science and engineering problems are soluble in ways human relations are not, and this stems not least from the fact that the responses to alterations in say a design are in many ways the more predictable. If you are one of the growing number of manufacturers of sex-dolls reading this, then draw heart.
For by March 23rd of that year the Prime Minister in the UK had imposed the severest lockdown that the British had known since, likely, World War Two. And even that had not been so diligently adhered to as had this: the author of say The Camomile Lawn for instance highlighting the fact that with bombs raining down on London and elsewhere almost guaranteeing a shortened span on Earth, sex with strangers was at a high unseen since perhaps the time of the Restoration of the Monarchy; and that’s not Prince Andrew we are talking about. For most men I imagine the effects of this would cause men equal concern as regards what would be going on in their workshops as it would in their beds.
Or possibly more. The closure of all hardware stores at a stroke meant that, for instance, if you broke a drill-bit then like Tom Hanks on the castaway island you had to work with only the stump instead. As I have from the outset worked in aluminium that was riveted together, the loss of a drill-bit was like losing your smartphone in a nightclub (not that I see the inside of those too often these days… but then again does anybody?). Upshot was the next phase of the project took around three months whereas it would formerly have taken around three days. I did venture as far in the car as the edge of the Lake District to purchase battery-packs, on the basis I was an ‘essential worker’ meeting the public’s future needs to be teleported in a Covid-safe manner, Officer.
Returning from San Fransisco though in view of the logistical problems presented with having arrived with a helicopter as checked-in baggage, I’d no inclination to go through the same rigmarole in reverse. Accordingly we had stripped the prototype of its costly innards look motors and speed-controllers, and offered all else to any of the takers locally including the aforesaid Hiller Museum. The expensive battery-packs had stayed anyway in the UK, and we had borrowed smaller packs for the event from Pete Bitar, for whose efforts we are most thankful and who continues apace to develop eVTOL types of one sort or another. One of the teams included however a semi-retired guy with a bald head and a beard who offered them the services of his people-carrier and who had been most attentive toward the family whilst Pete (Day) and I were elsewhere in the run-up to the Open Day in an effort to get the thing flying. As a consequence we bundled the phone-box, over-arching quadcopter body and skids into the back of his people-carrier and to the best of my knowledge they hang to this day from his warehouse ceiling some place in Los Angeles. If ever mine was the aeronautical design reproduced most widely worldwide in terms of unit sales, people would surely ask him it was doing there?
And that is not inconceivable, given the fact that what once was necessary to raise your backside in the air has tumbled economically if not literally in the way that the phone in your pocket now out-performs the super-computers of recent decades. In numerical terms the single most numerous mechanised form of transport on the planet has been the Honda Super Cub, which I am proud to have owned myself. Designed to be as cheap and as practical as possible from the outset by proprietor Soichiro Honda himself, it featured acres of plastic and a pressed-steel frame produced by a giant pastry-cutter. It was also an automatic with a single seat, and designed specifically for noodle-delivery riders to negotiate the narrow streets of Tokyo. As a result everyone else loved it and it became the hybrid scooter-come-motorcycle that one over the world to the tune of one hundred million units and counting. My ambitions then are humble, in so far as I would like to design the flying machine that out-sells very other in the history of humankind.
To return however to a workshop under the throes of lockdown, the strictures called for a careful consideration of how we would quite replace the prototype left behind in a warehouse in LA. I liked the idea of something you could sit in and that was redolent of those chair-lifts I had used on the ski-slopes, whilst offering altogether more protection from the elements. As the base of the box would constitute the chair itself with the legs overhanging just like on a ski-lift, then the undercarriage needed to be raised to allow for this to be comfortable for the seated passenger at rest and prior to take-off. In fact I would opt for a set of castors in each corner that albeit heavier than desired, worked well in this way. What I did not foresee is that unlike skids, castors are a pain on the arse when it comes to trailering around the country, for they do not want to stay put.
It was thus that the machine would be built as so often around the frame of a fibreglass Mothercare mannekin that I had acquired on eBay and collected from Hemel Hempstead upon my travels, remembering how invention is ninety-nine percent legwork? Ironically I had had this mannekin sat in the car when Marvin had conducted the first flight of the quad that was taken a day or two later to California for the competition, and not used it. This was a mistake I was not to repeat, the whole point of such videos being to convince a sceptical public that it might be their Johnny that could be gotten rid of in that way,
That flight itself had taken place in a village gymnasium local to Marvin, on the principal that as it took place in doors it would not constitute a flight so far as the UK CAA were concerned, and would itself be a throwback to the illustrious demonstration undertaken in Berlin by Hannah Reitsch in the 1930s, albeit without Hitler being present at our own. Finding indoor arenas was to become taxing in itself, however, not least because Aled had refused to test-fly the prototype any place outside in case it might go ‘postal’ and therefore damage his hard-earned brand. (This is not a fear without grounds, as I was once told on good authority that the reason Virgin did not get into flying training was because the last thing they needed was their logo on aircraft parts in a ditch). In fact my own local university gym refused on the basis that it might damage their rubberised surface, and as I find myself using it frequently in winter months I can only agree.
The advantage of Marvin’s gym however was that it was largely unattended evenings except by a student-receptionist studying her phone, who was wholly unconcerned at us giving our ‘drone’ a quick flight around the facility. Meanwhile using a side door we unloaded the prototype in parts like a pair of Ninjas and had it up and running inside within minutes. If nothing else this proved the practical modularity of the design, in so far as the quadcopter itself could literally be unclipped from the accommodation box and it in turn from the skids. To Marvin’s credit too, he had conducted the only truly successful test-flight and thus the only footage available to the project between February of 2020 and December of 2021 i.e. practically two years.
What would ensue following the opening three months of the pandemic however he is likely due rather less credit for. With the rebuilt prototype complete ~ a royal restoration in itself ~ it was driven again down South to Marvin’s place in the West Country along motorways that were blessedly empty due to the ongoing pandemic. In fact the best thing about the coronavirus was its affect upon various means of transport, which had become a delight to use instead of various forms of mobile hell-hole. That done it remained there for further weeks or months whilst I turned to promotion, comforted by the knowledge that he would be beavering away on the wiring and programming.
Fat chance, and as it turned out it was simply sat in his workshop keeping dry. Possession being he better part of the law, too, Marvin would demand a share in the company before proceeding further (for which read ‘lifting a finger’). After all, Aled had been given an ice-cream, hadn’t he? We had at the outset recommended that Marvin pitched in with the costs, in view of the fact all three of us (viz. Pete, Aled and I) had served the development with a good deal of free time or money. And in truth the crux of getting each of our prototypes flying had lain at Aled’s door, he being the only one among us (and including Marvin) with a working knowledge of how to build, fly and sell large drones.
This is the hazard though of working with people with neither a track record, nor the devil that you know. He had sought us out as a means of joining in with the fun of the competition, but then wanted an ‘out’ once he was tired of the new puppy… and at the worst possible moment. It was thus imperative that Pete and I resolve the situation and we would do so at a meeting at the local golf club, where Marvin would demand at least a share as large as Gwen Lighter’s in order to proceed. From my point of view, however, the one was a Harvard-educated lawyer who organised global aviation challenges with the contacts in our principal potential market to boot, and the other was a piecemeal house-builder with a penchant for flying radio-controlled models. Pete and I thus gave the notion careful consideration before loading the pristine prototype on the trailer and heading for the hills. Aled’s hills. Better if necessary to pay a professional up-front so as to be clear about the terms and conditions from he outset… an approach that paid dividends recently in the form of our most impressive test-flights to date, with among the largest of prototypes.
Would it were that easy, however. The current prototype had been designed from the outset to fall inside the twenty-five kilogram limit applied to regular drones that could be flown anywhere, albeit by registered operators. This would ultimately mean that I could fly it myself, although this is something I have been fighting shy of then and ever since. I’ve spent fifteen thousand hours flying real aeroplanes, and RC models have rarely of ever floated my boat. The closest I got with school-mates was whirring Airfix models around our heads at speed in a glorified game of conkers, an activity that I called the ‘unofficial’ school aero-club. I did a lot of that, organising a geographical film club that meant we could stay warm inside on lunch-breaks whilst showing films made by oil companies backwards. Or indeed, singing loudly during school assembly… a form of crime which like lampooning a dictatorship with over-effervescent praise that would be hard to punish.
Thus for the time being I continued to devolve ‘flying duties’ elsewhere. Meantimes this had involved a deal of transporting the prototype in parts in and around the car, or else hiring vans of the smaller variety. To address the issue going forward I had constructed my own T-shaped trailer using an expensive length of alloy box-section along with a pair of axles I had had hanging around and which were beginning to annoy me by their presence. As it happens, in the journey between Marvin’s West Country abode and Aled’s facility on the Welsh borders, the trailer began to fall apart and would eventually be abandoned on a slip road joining the M5 motorway. If I can locate which one then the salvage rights to the box-section alone would be worth the effort.
Nonetheless in the interim, the prototype had been designed using the lightest gauge possible (and 18 swg rings a bell), which would be sufficient for test-flights of the sort we had conducted in the gymnasium, but decidedly unsuited to the punishment ensuing from a drive along bumpy roads. As a consequence at one stage in the journey I became aware (and this always happens on the motorway, doesn’t it?) of a decided list in the appearance of the prototype visible in the rear-view mirror, consequent upon one of its arms having collapsed. The design at the time still called for an accommodation box flanked by four-pronged drones above and below, but the prongs of the lower quad (and that phrase always reminds me of Hogwarts) doubled us undercarriage legs. This in turn meant that they supported the weight of the vehicle in its entirety, and this quasi test-rig had proven the undoing of one such leg.
And thus at Aled’s at the end of another frustrating day we all stood around the trailer surveying the wreckage over a mug of tea. The sensible thing would have been to have left the whole shebang behind, where he could have applied a form of splint in order to complete the finishing touches so far as wiring and programming went. But then projects such as these rarely if ever involved the application of common sense.
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| That leg'll have to come off I'm afraid, Sir. |
