YASA Dabba Doo

Jet engines are notoriously thirsty at ground-level and I used to marvel at how the APU (which provides ground services to an airliner prior start) required a tenth of the fuel in the cruise that it did prior departure.

Accordingly this motor will allow airliners to taxi prior take-off or after landing with engines shut down. It was an issue at Heathrow ~ then the world's busiest ~ where we'd sit in line for upto forty minutes prior departure.

That's the good news. The maybe-less-so is that the Oxford academic who invented these axial-flow motors sold the company to Mercedes, not least because these things can turn out 1,000HP quite happily.

Ed. Bear in mind Germany does invest in manufacture and has the funds to do so, whereas in the UK we prefer property or gambling.

Get Realis

The UK has off-loaded the assessment of drones to a Canadian company, not having covered itself in glory the last time it tried: see the AAIB's report on an excursion of one such into the commercial airspace surrounding London's busiest airports.

Again too, as we offshore everything else... then if you can't beat them?

Carrier Advice

As the UK ponderously dispatches a carrier to the Gulf while imploring neighbours to provide the sort of escort it would need in order not to be sunk, the nimbler-footed are going for altogether smaller and more flexible means like this: among the first purpose-built drone-carriers, or at least in Europe.

Launching and landing fully-sized fighters (costing nowadays $100 million each) has always been problematic, and while it is for drones too there is less egg-on-face  ~ a significant concern in the West ~ if you lose one in the circumstances.

The UK lost one such mega-death jet when it dropped off the end of the carrier on take-off... because a foam plug had been left in an air-intake. It is always going to happen, yes, but need not always cost so much.*

Ed. Roughly, as Google's AI says. Governments rarely publish acquisition figures as (a) they're funded by taxes (b) are usually embarrassing and (c) nobody cares.

It Do Mean Jack: REACHR

Am sent encouraging news from across the water, where at North Carolina's State University a team is developing an amphibious maritime drone; so the pathology I suffer from is not wholly unique. It's designed for rescue operations in the aftermath of hurricanes, which is not so urgent a need here in Lancashire as it is there.

It is also designed to do more flying than sailing whereas my own efforts are geared to sailing with a touch of self-launch or surface-effect on the side. 

Nonetheless the team have garnered $4,000 from a crowd-funding campaign, and benefitted from ten times as much by way of a NASA grant. We don't have anything like a NASA in the UK, although it's the name I give to my wallet.

Like me they participated in the GoFly Challenge commencing almost ten years ago, which goes to show that if you engage in this form of madness you're in it for the long-term.

But well done guys... keep wet and carry on!

Elevator Pitch

Time to start setting our ducks in a row, and as I'm back early from the day job it's into the workshop for some C of G calculations. And afterward it's a bottle of red, cheese straws and salami during write-up: aerodynamics is fun if approached from the right angle.

Accordingly I park the 'Black Ops' drone on a length of tubing, which shows that the centre of gravity is around 7" aft of the forward bulkhead thus:

This I knew from prior builds, the excess weight of those booms and the skis they support pitching the prow down. I'm reluctant to foreshorten these however as they are going to be necessary when it comes to tackling rougher sea-states. Here tho' is what happens when we add the power-bank at the rear:

This pitches the C of G nicely central, the motors acting as a counterbalance. We've much practise at counterbalancing in Europe, for when we built the cathedrals some thousand years ago the bells that weighed several tons apiece had to be able to be swung by someone like Quasimodo. If you don't know who he is, incidentally, in the words of Will Young I think you better leave right now.*

What follows from this is the fact that the lift-motors being equidistant from that C of G, they ought to have no material effect on shifting it. It in turn means I can use tins of tuna instead, as I'm running out of motors here:

This is what fellow aerodynamics refer to as either the sweet spot, or dog's bollocks, because it means that if it launches into the air off the crest of a wave it is literally disinclined to pitch either downwards or upwards.

We're having to design for flight as well as planing on water here too, and note that for hovering flight from land to sea, what we want for a quadcopter is the mass of the craft to be pitched at the centre of all four corners of lift... and fuck, if it isn't here?

The bad news ~ and there's always bad news in life to counterbalance the good ~ is that for the 'lift' prototype we are going to need ballast at the rear to maintain this status quo. This however is standard MO for aircraft, so for instance if you remove a radar from the nose of a fighter jet you may need to fit a lump of lead in there in order to sustain the trim.

Broadly speaking aircraft designers are years ahead of marine architects, who have mainly to figure out what goes where whilst keeping the ship on an even keel. This is why fast boat design has become a bit shit in the 21st century, for whereas the Italians used to pitch motors centrally in their superior power-boats, now it's about hanging heavy-weight outboards on the back-end and having to build longer, heavier hulls to suit.

US excels at big and Japan small, whilst as ever the Brits are born to compromise. 

* Ed. Don't, it's the wine talking. Bear in mind The West Wing was powered by cocaine.

Vertical Flight Society

Renew my subs in order to keep my hat in the vertical ring: Sikorsky's a homburg, mine a flat cap in tribute to legendary local steam-head Fred Dibnah.

What the Hex?

Set the airframes out to dry over the weekend and was discombobulated by a knock at the door from the local PD who'd reports of witchcraft from more than one of the neighbours. Eventually they agreed they could remain there so long as I didn't plan to dance around them naked again.

The black drone is to be fitted with lift-motors to raise it into hover, and the grey solely with pusher-propellers to evaluate its ability to plane on water.

Not happening in a hurry unless the men in black appear, though subsequently each config will be combined toward self-launch and skimming flight clear of any surface.