Schnapp Rolls

Frankly I could watch this model throw shapes 'til I’m stiff all over, and indeed that day-glo beauty on the right of the frame-grab is Austrian Gernot Bruckmann’s entry in the F3P World Championships back in 2023!

I’m probably teaching granny to suck eggs, but F3P stands for flying model/radio control/indoor aerobatics and these pirouettes are worth tuning into on the 'Tube.

Of most interest is the fact Gernot - as discussed over Zoom and schnapps - went for contra-rotating propellers to reduce adverse torque… as we've done with our maritime drone!

The next FAI event is the drone soccer championship (Ed. WTF?) set for Shanghai in November: what's wrong with people?

Watch This Space

On behalf of you all, I have requested a high-res version of a photograph of Spitfire-wing-designer Beverley Shenstone's grave.

I would of course have visited it myself, except it is in Cyprus and not Ormskirk.

In the past I have visited both Atlantic Record founder Ahmet Ertugun's grave on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, and Shanghai policeman E. W. Peters' grave whilst I worked there... and which I decorated with a magnolia blossom from a nearby tree.

Never let it be said that I do not go the extra mile for the deceased, even if I rarely step outside my door for the living!

I am however as sickened as you are at Google selectively targeting ads for online therapy at me during the course of my ongoing researches.

Trans Issues

It's a sensitive issue I know, but it's time we had the conversation: transponders.

Yesterday was something of a double whammy, because not only did we spot that shiny Class 69 locomotive at the docks but we got to see this too, didn't we Gromit?

It was there late morning, but gone when I returned later in the afternoon; in fact a screen-shot from vessel-finder's website reveals it left at 12:18 precisely.

So let's hear it for Benny Peterssen.

It was he that evolved the idea of information exchange for shipping, which would only become mandatory for merchant fleets after the 9/11 attacks. Based principally on satellites, AIS is invaluable to the UK: Central Park when it comes to brokerage and insurance.

The system is called AIS or Automatic Identification System, although aircraft have long used transponders to transmit flight information to radar heads. A 'radar-head' is a rotating dish for transmission or receipt of radio signals, and not a fan of these systems per se.

Back in the 1990s aircraft transponders (developed originally from IFF or Identification Friend or Foe) it became ADS-B, or the snappy Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast system that the likes of FlightRadar24 relies upon.

Interestingly naval ships in the UK are fitted with aircraft transponders, presumably because the helicopters and jets that they host have them fitted too, such that they are all singing shanties from the same hymn-sheet.

I only noticed this on the final approach over the sea to Barcelona, when the nav display in front of me 'flagged up' a contact that appeared to be at or around sea-level, and therefore not ~ as you would hope ~ an imminent collision risk.

Our adoptive ship meantimes is bound for Halifax in Canada, and currently off the southwest coast of Ireland.

God speed, me hearties!

(Ed. Pathetic, but the sad bastard once considered a career in the merchant navy.)

A Day at the Docks

Yesterday was an exciting one for despite being there to collect container-loads of scaffolding tubes (dull), I chanced to spot this (not)! It was there hauling wooden pellets that had crossed the Atlantic from North America, over to power stations on the other side of the UK. Readers of the blog will recall this is because (a) Margaret Thatcher hated the working class and coal-miners in particular and (b) because this ticks 'green' boxes in ways that reopening coal mines wouldn't, even if it were more efficient and provided more jobs.

A further disappointment beside it working for Drax ~ a fairly corrupt corporation as a cursory Google search attests ~ it is in fact only a 'tribute' locomotive. It has the nameplate and motif 'Falcon 2' on the side beside its shiny green livery is a nod to a prototype loco produced by the Brush Works and Maybach during the 1960s... and Brush's foundry itself was called the Falcon Works. Geddit?

Brush itself did not produce brushes, but produced much else and was named after a man with that name. It produced aircraft in WW2, afterward being sold to aircraft manufacturer Hawker Siddeley before eventually being taken over by Westinghouse in 2011: which decided to close the company and its illustrious works that can still be spotted should you be passing through Loughborough station.

It encapsulates British industry, today benefitting from 4% of investment sourced in the City of London whereas a century ago it was near 80%. Thus companies that once produced ground-breaking prototypes for land, sea or air are reduced to parts manufacturers or asset-stripped by private equity firms: fake trains, fake factories, fake people, fake content.

N.B. Colin is available for children's parties.

Sarco Baby

It's such a lovely autumnal day ~ sun shining, birds singing, not a breath of wind ~ that fresh from my gym class I say "Come on kids, let's go home and write an essay about suicide!".

But we examine all forms of transport on this blog, and we cannot overlook a dead elephant in the room in the shape of this luxurious means of travelling to the other side.

Furthermore like all of the greatest transport inventions it was inspired here in the UK by someone with 'locked in' syndrome, who could only blink in response to any stimulus. In presumably a series of blinks he contacted a man in Australia who has a history of designing suicide machines: Philip Nitschke's pod improves upon prior inventions like the Thanatron and Mercitron by not having a name that sounds like they're about to attack the Starship Enterprise.

But it's not all good news for people having an off day, as it costs £15,000 and takes a month to 3-D print and another to assemble... so don't go looking for one at IKEA any time soon!

But you know how I like a good sketch, and to my mind its stylish lines and 360-degree view of what you're about to miss are well worth a test-drive, so long as there's a happy ending.

Researching this on Google incidentally leaves you feeling suicidal even if you did not start out that way, as it keeps telling you to go away and have a cup of tea in place of dishing out the vital stats. Which it does for no other subject: I mean if you ask it the best way to cook an egg, it doesn't ask you if you won't consider sausages instead, does it?

To my mind however the Sarco's acceleration from life-to-death is not one that Elon Musk would settle for, and my thoughts turned recently to the Titan submarine. In this sarcophagus, its collapse went from 0-1500 m.p.h in two milliseconds... which puts even the latest Teslas to shame. It was painless, cremation was included, there was no time for boring speeches and it produced no environmental impact.

Way to go?

(Ed. It's also the product of a sick mind, and you can go straight to bed right now).

 

Short and Sweet

For me the highlight of the US presidential visit to the UK, as it may have been for you too, was spotting those high-aspect ratio wings that first bore my commercial flying career aloft... as something similar discharged the Red Devils paratroop team.

I figured it may have been the Short 330, but upon closer inspection was more than likely the Skyvan, which came with a tailgate from the get-go rather than offering it as an option.

The extended 360 offered a large cargo-door beside three dozen seats, which made it ideal for running freight at night after the last passenger had departed; although none of the variants offered an auxiliary power unit for warming things up prior to flights on a cold night.

Before the Channel Tunnel provided for fast trains to the continent, among the first tasks allotted me as a first officer (why 'first' when there were no others?) would be to fly newspapers to places such as Paris, so that ex-pats could enjoy those same news-sheets over croissant instead of cornflakes. Unlike them, prior start-up we had only the faint glow of cockpit dials to warm ourselves by... but we loved it, didn't we Gromit?

This would have been out of London Gatwick, although later I would do the same at Stansted where the papers were destined for Dusseldorf and the British Forces of the Rhine (BOAR). I feel now some satisfaction that our own boys ~ as they mostly were back then ~ were sent forth off the back of maiden (yeah, right) breasts that featured among our glorious tabloids at the time.

The demise of the aircraft was principally brought about by more fuel-efficient types like the ATR-42 and -72, and these like all airliners today made up with cost-savings for what they lacked in character.

But the -360 was the last gasp for that illustrious company founded by the Short brothers at the outset of aviation. Although they would surely have found school difficult with a name like that... much as the Ugly sisters did at my own school.

The book cover is one that will be imprinted on memory until my dying day in that weird way that certain images are formative for us as kids: and features a Skyvan. Ian Allan's publishing venture migrated from trains to aircraft, and using one such volume I 'spotted' the Boeing 707 G-ARWE which later caught fire in dramatic circs. My brother did not believe me, incidentally, like brothers rarely do.  

Wigan Peer

The UK has been known in the past, as now, for fielding talents in middle distance events. In my college days I'd lunch at the cafe in the sports complex at Sheffield, negotiating the same track that Seb Coe was using to train, he bent on glory and I on a cheese roll.

The BBC referred to 'training back in Manchester' afforded the two girls medalling today in Tokyo; although my interest was piqued by the football stadium appearing in the preamble. And indeed it turns out Keely Hodgkinson is training here in Wigan, as confirmed by my placement of that little orange character in Google Maps.

And isn't it me pacing Keely at far right? No it isn't, though it is trainer Jenny Meadows holding a clipboard. Jenny has been known to feature in the same Parkrun that I appeared in myself only yesterday... 27:25, and I only have to halve that in order to qualify for Team GB! 

Like me though what most sports commentators will take away from this is how the tree on the left side of the foot-bridge has grown since Google took its picture.

Well done!!!

Shef Field

Amongst the dross dropping through my letter-box (Denmark recently abolished its postal service altogether), a circular from my old alumnus Sheffield asking me to  support a student... cheeky bastards.

Sheffield's own failure reflects mine own, hanging like an albatross around my neck.

It is most famous for its Soviet-style council cutting down the many trees that made it what it was, and jailing pensioners at the same time as we so like to do in the UK.

Its football teams are shit and it is the only substantial city without an airport, while it boasts two that are defunct.

They could be forgiven though, because post-Channel Tunnel the UK is incapable of building anything much aside from a sizeable tent on the south side of the Thames.

Contrast China, which whilst I was there took the top of a mountain so as to flatten it sufficient for an airport ~ and used a similar overburden to build a new airport for Hong Kong.

Sheffield's principal effort at establishing infrastructure was its City Airport situated to the east of the city in an area none of its inhabitants (including me at the time) dreamt of visiting prior the shopping mall, it formerly home to giant steelworks.

Looking at the map you can see the problem: the only means of getting to the airport (now flagged as the business centre) was the car, and there was insufficient space for parking; it largely explaining how by 2002 there were under three-dozen passengers per day.

I know because I called once (Ed. he didn't) to ask when one flight was scheduled, and they said "What time can you get here?".

In short though it is bound by motorways and high ground to the east, and moaning Minnies (as Thatcher liked to call people) to the west. The runway was 1200m long, whereas the ones I frequented elsewhere were as much as 4000m; so it catered for high-cost business flights at a time we were selling the industry off to firms based in Ireland, Greece or Hungary that provide the low-cost means of destroying a planet which we all enjoy today.

In the end it was sold to Peel Group for £1, who sat on it until they could replace it with a business park and profit by £1,000,000. (Southampton's council sold its airport to Peter de Savary along with permission for a business park, ensuring he pocketed £18,000,000 instead of the residents; councillors having the business acumen of a turnip).

The same fate awaited Sheffield-Doncaster airport even further to the east and once home to both V-bombers and latterly me, learning to fly. I returned at the helm of an Airbus decades later, and like your old school it all looked smaller than I recalled.

It too was and still is owned by Peel Group, a storied rags to riches (actually quarry-stone to landfill) northern company that you have to admire, having steamrollered its way to owning most of the country's infrastructure from a modest home in Bury.

But Sheffield's singular failure lies in not having awarded me an honours degree, in some ways appropriate given I'm not especially honourable. Hinging on a viva voce (and if you don't know what that is you don't deserve one either) it fell to a bearded academic from Leicester who queried why in one essay I suggested the two halves of Germany might one day be reunited... this being 1980.

"It's never going to happen, is it?" I was admonished.

Subsequent to the events of 1989 I wrote to the vice-chancellor of the university:

Dear Vice Chancellor,

In light of the reunification of Germany, give me my honours degree you fuckers."

Sincerely

Colin Hilton BSc (no Hons)

He wrote back to say that, this being pre-digitisation all test-papers were destroyed after seven years, they doubtless having drawn inspiration from the Stasi.

But that said, Sheffield: loved the place and the people. Tasked once with knocking on doors for a Geography project, its pensioners were only too happy to take part, often having spent fifty years or more down a coal-pit or forging steel.

And the best part of all of this is that the city is now the only one in the world with a car-park that includes a control tower.

(Ed. as to whether Germany might reunite, in fact Colin wrote: 'I'll take a punt on it, yeah.').

New Tilt

This air vehicle from Airev recently dropped across my desk ~ or would have done if I had one ~ but it took a good deal of digging to discover from whence it came.

And then the penny dropped, for trying as an Israeli company to market fun means of transport as against ones for dropping things from a great height must be about as rewarding as a root canal treatment.

They would clearly need a lift and politics aside I do like a good sketch and hope the one here is not the creation of some or other means of artificial intelligence.

Perhaps farthest along the road to a successful personal air vehicle however is what used to be called Blackfly (because I realised after a sleepless night that it was both black and flew) and is now called Pivotal.

And what most struck me from watching a doctor in the Rockies go about his daily business in one was not where to put a stethoscope but how little energy it required once on the move, thanks to a pair of wings.

Basically that dropped from around 80% capacity during a vertical lift-off (leftovers are required should one of the eight motors drop out), to 20% once on the move.

The people designing the Airev claim more like a 60% contribution from that source, which is probably explained by the fact wings are rigged at a more customary angle.

For as an alternative to pitching the propellers over to point forward, the fuselage in either case is pitched over in flight to set the airfoils at a usable angle of attack, as they would ordinarily be stalled at the get-go.

Thus the wings here are rigged at an angle of around 20°, those of Pivotal at close to 45° and a conventional fixed-wing aeroplane (let's choose the Spitfire) at just 2°.

The disadvantage of adverse rigging is that you're never sat level throughout as you would be in a car, but tilted one way or the other depending on the phase of flight.

But then during a take off in the Spitfire you were gazing at the heavens for longer than you'd want, rather than what lay beyond the end of the runway.

(Ed. Colin never got a free flight in a Spitfire, but as with much else in his life, could have done. Age sixteen at RAF selection he shared a barracks with Mark Hanna, and in middle age would rendezvous with his father Ray for a photo-shoot. The saddo is proud of the fact that among a misty horizon in East Anglia, he saw Ray before Ray spotted him: "Achtung, Spitfire!!!" he told the wedding-photographer, deafened by the rattle of his Canon from within their Cessna 182 as the Mk.9 flew alongside. Ray asked if they couldn't go any faster, but how many people get the chance of shooting a Spit with its flaps extended?).

Queen of the Seas

It was perusing Model-Boats' website that I discovered the boat of my childhood ~ my Rosebud if you will ~ was not scratch-made but a plywood kit. Both Aerokits and Irvine engines were located together in High Barnet in North London... once of Hertfordshire. Both are defunct*, despite the latter having powered a model aeroplane to nearly 200 m.p.h. off the back of just 2.50 cubic centimetres... cube for cube I doubt that could be beat.

You can see dear reader (Ed. less of the Jane Austen?) how we would struggle with launching this from one side of the pond in a Liverpool park only to catch it at the other, absent any form of remote control... this bad boy mounting a 10cc diesel.

I have asked that my cremated remains be mixed with fuel and powered by such a boat into that eternal sunset on whose other side there is neither need for catching, nor any tears.**

Finally may I take a moment not to bother apologising for the quality of the image?

* Not North London or Hertfordshire.

** And that was last Sunday's sermon.

Old Model Army

Browsing images I discover the model boats website, venture a post and flattered by the reaction; although it was Otto Lilienthal who said that to invent an aeroplane was nothing, to build one was something and to fly it was everything and that would apply to boats equally am thinking. That said he died trying and so it may be better to stop at nothing.

I'm in good company though, surrounded by the Falkirk Wheel that I would like to add to the Anderton Lift in order to get the set; and that's a model of the lifeboat powered by steam that was once launched from across the Mersey at New Brighton.

I have in the past been a member of the Large Model Association, although mainly for the insurance cover it provided people flying unreasonably-sized drones. I felt it would attract a younger membership were it to showcase new-builds and whilst I am in awe of the people who build these ghosts of Christmases past and present, I think there is a lot to be gained for having people think for themselves.

In fact not far from New Brighton on the Wirral is Ellesmere Port's automotive plant where generations of Vauxhalls have been built under the aegis of General Motors, or lately Stellantis. For years they hosted a model car competition for children who would exhibit designs of their own that they'd also built from hobby-craft materials.

You'd struggle to find an image on Google, because in those stranger times you'd look at things instead of taking photos which you'd never look at ever again.

So let's hear it for the happy campers assembling... on both workbench and online.

You Do Send Me Flowers Any More

I was trying to recall where I heard of Gerbera and then I realised: the lovely daisy-like flowers that adorn the beds of old English gardens. And it appears the Russians just mailed a bunch to NATO to see how it would react. But I worked in Gdansk for a while with an airline whose name sounds like a synonym for a PISS; it was there WW2 broke out when Germany launched shells ~ and not the pretty ones ~ at the Polish redoubt of Westerplatte.

One defence publication caught my eye, saying that Russia depends on China even when it comes to producing foam-and-plywood drones. This is a little harsh, for as we have seen the UK depends on Ukrainian companies when it comes to producing drones costing less than a half-million dollars... and on China for everything else.

And on closer inspection the Gerbera is built around a plywood box section to which injection-moulded foamed-plastic parts are attached, like with the Airfix models of my childhood. The machines required to produce such parts are the size of a small house and decidedly expensive outside of China; all in all not the sort of thing you'd want to move around the battle-front.

It gets more entertaining because aside from a DLE engine from the same source ~ and what a waste of a fine unit, launching it over the horizon never to return ~ the chips providing for guidance are all sourced in the West... but at least we're getting them back.

What is most fascinating however is that the way modern wars are being waged is all based on RC modellers: the people in anoraks flying scale aircraft around in the rain. For the Gerbera's airframe is produced by a company that will sell you similar models, should you wake one day with the urge to invade Poland. 

DLE's motor was designed not so much for one-way drones, as for aircraft built and flown by the likes of the Large Model Association whose ranks of old men in baseball caps are undermining the West dressed as nuns.

There is even a DLE Owners Facebook page...

https://www.facebook.com/groups/265522257303282/posts/2084859632036193/

... honorary president V. Putin, 97 Acacia Avenue, Moscow.

(Ed. Put the lid back on that Novichok please, before someone gets hurt?)

Over Hexed, Over Priced and Over Here

We rely on our political masters to take us to war because they know better... which is how Tony Blair for instance knew there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

News though that a Ukrainian drone manufacturer has chosen an unused hangar at RAF Mildenhall (which ought really to be called USAAF Mildenhall but looks better if it remains on our books) to manufacture the fixed-wing surveillance drones that it developed and built over there.

They will then be tested at the privately-owned airfield at Elmsett, because former publicly-owned ones like Ipswich have long been converted to housing estates with avenues named after aircraft in place of real ones, and Jackson Bollock artworks to reference what went before.

What is most astonishing is that anyone got permission to build an airfield of any sort ~ albeit on farmland ~ even back in 1969, instead of a retail park with shitty statuary. Circa WWII there were as many as seven hundred airfields in the British Isles, but at least we've as many retail parks circa 2025.

Mildenhall doubtless has a nuclear missile with its name on it, but I wonder how the good people of Elmsett, population 788, feel about the situation?

Though there may yet be residents who recall the fateful night in 1941 when bombs doubtless targeting retail parks in nearby Ipswich struck a row of terraces with fatal results?

I used for a while to train would-be flyers at the airfield in Ipswich, driving there on occasion daily from south London, and looking back I have to wonder why. But its art-deco tower and terminal, effectively abandoned, included all sorts of historical means of navigation equipment like VDF receivers; which despite being invented by Marconi on a wet afternoon were still used at Finningley when I was learning myself.

Sunday Sermon #3

Albeit Tuesday.

But we're gathered here today, for during this month it appears there's much flag-waving going on and we're all wondering why?

Until 1958 the UK celebrated Empire Day, when it became Commonwealth Day but not so far as most people were concerned; because having called it one thing for a half lifetime nobody was going to say any different any time soon. Thus it was that on whichever day it was, Union Jacks were available to buy at newsagents and that was great because kids like waving them around.

Adults doing so in the UK is bothersome however, because we've rarely displayed them as adults unlike younger nations; we've generally been painted as being much like a nation in its senility and long past displays of any sort. Accordingly I do find, despite hanging a Red Ensign I found some place or other on the wall at university, videos of flag-wavers or lions with painted faces vaguely embarrassing.

In fact there is a march this month by a man called Tommy Robinson apropos this kind of thing, and like all of us he has interesting points to make and some less so... the quality of debate something dying faster than democracy in our online world.

He's on record ~ whilst not using his real name but then nor does Sting ~ for saying how the Luton of his childhood had two mosques and now it has another forty. The counter-argument is that should the English have had a similar number of churches then and only two now, you could ask the question, "What is Englishness anyway?".

PM John Major said that fifty years from now (viz. 1943) ours would still be a place of long shadows over cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs and dog-lovers... tho' will it still be a place of traditional places of worship, I ask like Alan Partridge?

I zoomed into the maps to see. Which is ironic, because at that same university I was tasked with a dissertation and couldn't think of one to save my life. In the end and lukewarmly-inspired by a lecture, I decided to see if trees really did shrink in stature the further up a slope you got out in the dales. This involved measuring the depth of soil with an auger, a pastime to tedious and difficult in semi-frozen earth that my colleague and I went for a pub-lunch and fabricated the data instead.

As I failed anyhow, in retrospect I don't see this being held against me at heaven's gate... which brings us back to our scrutiny of Luton.

Cutting to the chase, back in 1963 there were some three dozen PoWs or places of worship in my lexicon in Luton and its surrounds. By 2025 there were only half the number if you consider the Orthodox Church of Romania was unlikely to have been there before the EU and its free-border experiment with all its joys and birth-pangs.

Nonetheless all English life is there on Google's map: the Grove Theatre, Tesco Express, the trampoline park and airport encapsulating all totems and beliefs that make our lives worth living. Note that the M1 motorway appears back in 1963, being completed in 1959. It connected the capitol with Crick in Northamptonshire. Why?

Bizarrely Google Maps do not count mosques as places of worship per se, but using the word itself it produces around the same number in Luton as the above places of worship.

What we could conclude is that were places of worship glaciers they may disappear in the next sixty years; or that the number of mosques may match their number as it was in 1963 when the Robinsons were considering off-spring. It may however merely reflect the fact that it was harder to get permission to build a mosque in 1963, and that traditional places of worship were already there, and had been for practically a century.

It is hard though to separate Englishness from Christianity, so that frankly requiring immigrants to convert to it in order to prove their authenticity is bizarre in a state where (unlike the US), most people only vaguely associate with its tenets.

We'd be better accustoming them to driving to retail parks on a Saturday evening to drink lager, go ten-pin bowling, eat curry afterward and then watch Love Island on catch-up on 86-inch TVs.

Only then could you claim to be at home among our merry Anglo-Saxon throng.

I forwarded this to Sheffield University by way of replacement: give me an honorary degree, you miserable bastards (Ed. and three Hail Mary's or five burpees for you).

War of Words

Until you hear that the UK only replaced the word 'War' with 'Defence' in 1964 after nearly two hundred years: so there were long precedents and we may wonder what all of the fuss is about in the US this week?

That aside, it is a remarkable fact that the number of defence contractors in the US has shrunk in recent years from 193, to just 3 (and there is a citation for that, but I don't do appendices).

In the UK, effectively there is only one, which also required renaming: from British Aerospace to BAE Systems. It would have to, really, because (mine excepted) few boats are designed to fly.

For this week they just sold five frigates to Norway for the defence (war?) of the Atlantic... so well done them!

But You Read It Here First

... as you did the Air India crash, as you did the Malaysian Airlines loss, as you did...

Wal... kart

(The reason if the T-boat proves to work that my first port of call will be China.)

For when it comes to fresh-air product and trying something new, they are what the US was in the 1950s and 1960s...

... while the UK is all about nostalgia. Take the government grant awarded to Rolls-Royce to combine a Siemens motor and American airframe for the speed record we'd forget about a month later; and pull out of electric motors altogether, it having taken a successful Turkish CEO to point out that they ought to stick to the knitting?

Capturing my attention recently are videos of kart-boats retailing at Walmart for what is said to be as little as $700, but in reality looks to be ten times that if you'd like it to run for more than a fortnight.

The underlying picture however is how electric jet-pumps are transforming sports on water. There have been efforts to power surfboards that date back to the 1960s and record-breaker Malcolm Campbell was filmed using one such before his fateful visit to Coniston.

This was with an outboard, however, and it was only relatively recently that an IC engine was squeezed inside the board itself. And then, in the way flat-screen TVs were nowhere and then everywhere, practically every PWC or personal watercraft to be seen has an electric jet-pump.

I've commented on the vulnerabilities of hydrofoils ~ and the use of defensive chain between each side of harbours like the Golden Horn dating back several centuries ~ but there are still advantages a hydroski offers over jet-boats, which:

(a) in shallow enough water, are stopping and

(b) whilst in air, if only briefly, are decelerating.

Which may not matter to surfers, but does to maritime drones.

Technical Disclosure: Split Ski

Patent specification GB2493789B discloses a T-shaped boat comprising planar deck and keel in support of a single hydro-ski, and subsequent developments include a pattern for sheet materials which features a top for a foam-filled deck and a double-sided keel. Consequently in order to extend the flat-packed means of construction to operational deployments, this hydro-ski might be split into two parts able to be folded upward for storage. The same means would allow for shallow-water operation prior to deployment of the keel at a greater depth.

This hasn't just occurred to me now, but John Crawshaw Taylor from hereabouts, who invented the cordless kettle, was fond of pointing out that most patents could be got around or improved upon by a technicality.

Hungary for Change

We've been dwelling on things cable-related today, haven't we darlings, and I need to get this one both of my chest and desktop and onto the world's biggest and most influential transport blog... but I can't find it.

I came across it whilst looking at the Red Dot design awards, where I considered I might enter my boat... until I saw that it cost money to do so.

How this thing works though is that each of those cabins can be propelled along the streets on tramlines using an electrical pod, from which it can be disconnected at the terminus in order to transform into a cable car.

Sadly elevated cable-cars barely exist as means of public transport, appearing to be the go-to means of getting people to the tops of summits for (a) the view and (b) ski-ing, while it lasts.

Nonetheless if you could fly into Lukla and take a tram to base camp that becomes a pressurised cable-car to the summit, then I'd be up for it.

All it would need is a bit of imagination, and a death-wish.

Director's Cut: August 2025

So bad, it's good... looks like something off Mad Max or Waterworld.

I've invented lots of things, too many, a number of which better people than I have gone on to develop into commercial products.

But the best stuff's not about the money, money, money but inspiring others to get off the sofa and try for themselves.

The thing about designs is that no-one else will prototype them for you, but there'll be any number happy to produce and sell them once they've been proven.

Which I'm fine with. In fact I'm doing this to show myself that a lifetime of sacrifice for castles in the air has not been entirely wasted.

And to keep you entertained.

As much as anything too, it's about developing something I believe to be original, and then improving its performance so that it exceeds anything that went before.

You can see the history of my designs for water at the following link. All or most are essentially flat-packs, which is what makes them accessible to you or I.

Searches on T-shaped boats or hulls elicit nothing, which is good news or else bad.

Let's see if we can change that and, as Steve Jobs said, put a dent in the universe.

Or at least mine.

https://www.boatdesign.net/gallery/users/colinhilton.53622/

Turning Over ALEF

One of the so-mad-I-love-it series, of which there'll probably be only one entry, this flying car seen at Half Moon Bay... of which I've also fond memories dating back to the GoFly Challenge centred thereabouts.

The body a grid that forms a multifaceted wing when tilted to face the airflow, which required the cabin to rotate through the same ninety degrees so that you can see where you're headed.

It's rightly attracted investment, and rightly so as we'd all want one in order to skip around those jams, which are a permanent feature of LA for instance.

What a lot of this modern electrical tech is doing is to revive the inspiration of failed genius of past times. Check out Horatio Phillips 'multiplane' for instance, along with others with upto two hundred separate wings:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Horatio_Phillips_1904_Multiplane.png

Horatio did this work, along with much more in aeronautics, over a hundred years ago. Although what I most feel affinity for was the fact it was all taking place among Streatham Hill in South London, where I used to drink back in the day.

Well done Alef, well done Horatio, and well done me.

Braking News

With the loss of lives in Lisbon yesterday evening, like you my immediate thoughts turned to funicular drive-mechanisms. But this one is personal too: I've ridden most of the cablecars, elevators and funiculars thereabouts and ~ literally ~ got the scale model and the framed print.

Funiculars are named after the Latin word for rope, and ropeway railways were long in use in industry in England for instance, from prior the Industrial Revolution. As a matter of fact there is still one running to this day from a quarry up high to the yard down below, which is already on my bucket list as it is set to end soon.

Like the passenger versions, it relied on the downward payload to assist wholly or partly with the haulage upward; so there is a tourist funicular in Somerset which includes a water-tank on either carriage, the one at the top filling it from a stream so as to be heavier than the one on the way up, thus requiring no energy at all.

This though is the most revealing pic I can find that might explain the accident, as the first thing to know about mainstream media reporting upon transport fatalities is that (a) they most want to show you the mangled bodies as that's what we like and (b) the technical insight is shit, which doesn't matter as it suits our expectations.

For me however it's annoying, because it means I have to conduct patent searches before breakfast. Among which the funicular here was refurbished in the recent past and I was always most nervous when it came to flying airliners that were fresh out of overhaul.

In the pic though the yellow pointers show the running rails and cable slot for the inbound carriage and red the outbound. The observant among you will fear a crash is imminent already, seeing as they clearly overlap. They've thought of that though and around the middle of the hill there is a section only one can pass through at a time, and situated so that there is a different length of cable for each thereabouts.

The cable is usually driven by an engine at the foot of the hill and the way it differs from a cable-car ~ whether this be up a mountain in Switzerland or hill in San Fran ~ is that carriage and cable are connected to each end of the cable, whereas cable-cars are connected somewhere along a continuous loop.

In fact the only reason the cable needs to be in a slot at all is to preserve it from the weather and to stop pedestrians crossing the road from having to step over it. But at some point in the proceedings, members of the jury, they decided to replace the stationery engine at the foot of the funicular with an electrical motor in each of the carriages, driven by an overhead supply, for reasons best know to themselves.

Ordinarily this would not work, because up hills so steep you need separate means to grip the surface and apply the necessary torque, and that is generally in the form of a rack-and-pinion. A pinion is a geared wheel and the rack also a cogged surface that is merely laid out flat so as to engage the pinion along the length of an incline.

Here is where it gets murkier, because the traction or grip that a rack-and-pinion provides is so formidable... that on some cable-drawn transport systems it is used as the essential back-stop in the form of a brake, should all else fail.

This is because steel-on-steel, as they call conventional railways, is not so good at stopping or in fact going: which is why Autumn is so perilous for commuters with its 'leaves on the line'... or indeed the episode of Casey Jones we've all seen in which he throws the loco into reverse after the brakes fail (Ed. who the fuck?).

Despite the mainstream media pinning the blame on a derailment, therefore, what came first: a cable snapping, or wheels off the track? Given it clearly hit the bend at speeds unimagined? For even had the wheels left the track and made the brakes even less effective, the ultimate back-stop would have been the dead weight of a carriage travelling the opposite way: but only were it still connected.

The saddest part, aside from all of the ensuing sadness, is that the system may yet be sanitised. Health and safety did not really feature in the design of these carriages whose lower half is of welded steel like a ship, and the upper coach-built like the horse-drawn carriages from whence they evolved; the seats wooden, people stood up, not a seat-belt in sight.

My most recent outing on a funicular was in the oil-rich city of Baku, where I took junior in order to divulge the facts of life, like how steam-engines work. It was exceedingly safe, but missing all of those missing safety features which I consider essential to its authenticity.

I rode Madrid's metro when its seats too were wooden, and though the replacement is a world apart... for me it's lost its soul, like wine in a tetrapak instead of a bottle.

p.s. I don't normally ask people to share, but do reach out to a funicular enthusiast among your cohort... there are at least five of us out there.

p.p.s. As a child atop Salzburg's funicular, when asked by my younger sibling how it worked I said they'd simply release the brake... he's never been the same since.

p.p.p.s. Best funicular-based movie: Zorba the Greek