Eindecker

Loving these Russian models because as warfare turns towards wholesale adoption of drones, as we're taken back to WW1 except on a tiny and unpiloted scale.

Compare this one for example with Fokker's Eindecker more than a century prior... apparently a 'spotter' familiar to the era judging by the camera out front.

Key to their success ~ albeit at killing people ~ is the fact they are self-confessedly 'cheap' and 'simple', which are words you'll never find used in defence of the UK for instance, where everything has to be 'expensive' and 'complicated' and provided by either BAE Systems or French-owned Thales on a you-scratch-my-back basis.

There are now more admirals apparently in the Royal Navy than fighting ships for them to serve on, which is only fair with Britain being an aristocracy. But when you look at its armed forces you realise the ranks are great at what they do, but rot sets in as you go progressively higher and especially arriving at government: talent and intelligence following the inverse square law.

A friend and Chelsea supporter used to say that Newcastle's problem was that they thought they were a big club, but they weren't (though that was then).

Realistically I think we should admit that the illusion applies nowadays to the UK too and in fact we do not have to look very far for a solution. Ireland is a neutral nation that is on the up, and nor is it a member of NATO. It does maintain a standing force that includes an army, navy and air force; the latter including no fighter jets.

The way combat has changed is wholly down to one thing, which is miniaturisation of processors and associated components ~ including satellites ~ enabling them to be put into motion by artificial intelligence and sensory means like Dr Frankenstein's monster.

And thus when it comes to sustaining life, small is beautiful...

...just as it is when it comes to destroying it too.

Re: Views

As much as to cheer myself up as anything I green-light the new toilet, purchasing it from Wickes and submitting my review in advance as moderation takes a week.

I therefore avoided any scatalogical references, instead referring only to an American football team... which will likely be lost on them anyway.

I got into reviewing when I bought a pair of folding doors at B & Q, and posted the following:

"Fell in love with these bi-fold doors at first sight, to the extent I've booked a Caribbean cruise for the three of us!"

The moderator passed them without further ado, it doubtless having relieved the crushing boredom of reading people's opinions of doors in general.

AI will doubtless consider the one up top, which as we all know can be played like a fiddle.

KRUP(iece of)S(hit)

Before work can recommence on the boat there's the thorny issue of the coffee-machine, which has been constructed by German firm KRUPS in Indonesia ~ and which requires a screwdriver with a head no hardware store is likely to carry in order to disassemble.

So that, in short, I've to liberate the switch that's failed with an angle-grinder. The way it appears to work is that push-button momentarily connects those golden arcs which in turn fire-up the processor. This switches the light to red (thing at centre) whilst supplying 240 volts to the heater, which thermostatically triggers the green LED to signal Houston that we're go for hydraulics.

What I'd hoped to do was hard-wire it for switching at the mains, although despite this being a five-volt circuit you and I know that however I do this it'll go BANG and disable the supply to the entire house... leaving me way behind on that to-do list, including a toilet that has pissed itself all over the bathroom floor.

Of course the designers of the 'Piccolo' could have provided a simple rocker-switch to have done much of this and which could be hard-wired, but then we wouldn't burn through the world's natural resources and pollute it nearly so effectively, would we?

KRUPS were vital to the war effort in WW2, and have clearly identified my Achilles Heel in the shape of my shitty piccolo even nowadays.

Not something that will ever have bothered George Clooney, I'm guessing?

Ed. No, and he got a shag afterwards too...

Smoking Gun?

Loathe as I am to cast ‘expert’ opinions on deaths in aircraft ~ there’s enough of those already ~ the stats on the rare occasion I’m bothered to follow them suggest that you, dear reader, like me to do so.

And what struck me about the death of the pilots at La Guardia following collision with a fire truck was what went before. For as Poirot might suggest, the crash like the shot itself may merely be a distraction.

Many years ago I was struck by the efforts of one ex-BA pilot to flag an issue that has never really gone away, but like ice from the barrel of a gun is practically impossible to discern in the aftermath. And that is that certain planes, flown often enough, were to have a debilitating effect on an almost statistically insignificant number of pilots in the long term… but countless in the short. Bear in mind in all of this that BA has long been run by shits, as Richard Branson pointed out at length in ‘Dirty Tricks’.

Accordingly I attended a presentation at Cranfield ~ the UK’s centre of aeronautical excellence that was not best pleased to have rented the space ~ by a small cohort who were fascinated by the deleterious side-effects of operating in or near turbine engines. This included a speaker who had collated illnesses on oil rigs, whose air-conditioning and electrical supplies run on static turbine engines.

The point was, as the middle-aged guy shuffling around with a stick in front of me was able to attest, that what happens in the compressor section does not stay there as it might at Vegas, but is ingested into the cabin along with the ‘bleed air’ that provides both heat or cooling besides pressurisation. He himself had been first to operate a 737 whose engines had been chemically flushed following an encounter with the long tail of the Icelandic volcano that shut down Heathrow.

For it seems that ~ and the 757 was notorious here in the UK at least, along with the 146 ~ the oil in which the bearings ran would, under pyrolysis caused by faulty or overheated bearings, vaporise and work its way in breathable form into the cabin. Unfortunately it turns out to that the multifarious additives in modern lubricants contains chemicals that in one case were used in Vietnam as nerve agents to incapacitate the Vietcong.

Bizarrely those investigating instances of such contamination reported the odour produced as being not unlike ‘sweaty socks’, which I found barely credible until taxying out at Manchester one night when confronted by the same smell as the auxiliary power unit ~ a small jet at the rear of the fuselage ~ was shut down. I pursued the flight, not least because that’s barely an excuse to cancel everyone’s holiday and a fairly sure fire method of being let go.

And that was part of the problem, for it was the problem which therefore bore no name. Nonetheless someone close to me who’d experienced something similar during operation of a wide body bound for the same airport was barely able to complete the technical log in the aftermath; whilst another of the same airlines captains was driving a tram in the city after long-term incapacitation.

At the risk of boring you I headed up Airbus training at a facility in Gatwick now owned by CAE, and was practically the only one there not to have been invalided out of flying for one medical reason or another and ~ you guessed it ~ one such due a hard-to-determine condition that meant he could no longer work ~ you guessed it again ~ within BA’s 757 fleet.

All of this was largely dismissed as bollocks by the bulk of pilots, who are spunky fellows, although as with UFOs we had all either seen one, or knew others who had.

Now, beside the fact I live in a farming community where local wisdom has it too many farmers died too young after exposure to various pesticides, or the fact we’ve all seen Erin Brokovich, there have been any number of occasions when aircraft have returned to the gate following the appearance of a mist in the cabin that has left at least some of the passengers requiring at least short-term hospital treatment beside…

… a Canadair regional jet requiring an emergency landing at La Guardia, with cabin crew reporting obnoxious and debilitating fumes at the rear of the cabin (where in fact all three engines are, if you count that APU).

And so could it be that this silent killer ~ investigation into which has long been suppressed by Big Oil and what might be called ‘Big Air’ ~ has finally shown its true colours, albeit with the collateral deaths of two pilots instead of simply the premature?

Don’t however let it ruin your holiday ~ the thinking has always been that as with any ailment, some are more genetically prone to ill-effect than others.

And we are all walking around with a credit-card's worth of plastic in ourselves.

‘That’ll do nicely, Sir’ as my own doctor puts it.

Ed. We apologise (actually we don’t) for the quality of the image, taken from TV while on a sofa.

It's a Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad World

Seven years since I investigated its feasibility, but now its reality... at least on social media. The takeaway in the first case being that it was never going to fly, and in the second that in the only way it matters nowadays, it's flying already.

The giveaway however in that latter case are the facts that (a) you don't want to be trying it out over the world's deepest canyon (b) those propellers should ideally be turning and (c) they do create 200lb's worth of downwash and last time I was there ~ unless they've cleaned it since ~ it was dusty.

Bear in mind however that to most of us, suitably sedated by the blue pill, it's real.

And what's Orwellian about it is not that any Big Brother has orchestrated the fact we no longer distinguish truth from fiction... but that we'll happily do it to ourselves.

Ed. Tho' if you think we're characters in a matrix, try telling it to a traffic cop.

Sharp Intake of Breath

Reading matter I chose whilst travelling recently included a book on the inevitable extinction of the human race ~ and not before time ~ and Adrian Newey's book on how to design a car. Or more specifically a Formula 1 car, the most researched and to my mind over-complicated type on the planet.

Rear-engined racing cars are nothing new, used by both Audi and Mercedes long before they were standardised, largely due the efforts of the likes of Lotus. They do though share a problem with turbo-propeller engines, which unlike an everyday jet is unable to draw breath directly from in-front, where the propeller is located. As for the race-car, it's the driver in the way.

When they first arranged an intake behind the driver's head it was three-sided like an inverted horse-shoe, which meant that the airflow was disrupted over the lip by interference from the driver's helmet. The solution was to separate the mouth of the intake ~ and the incoming airflow ~ altogether, as had been done with every turbo-prop engine out there since the 1950s.

Adrian however only introduced this standardised layout in the mid 1990s after... gazing out the window of an island-hopping aircraft in the Caribbean. Like me, tho' with success, he likes to fix design issues during flights and sketch the results prior to handing them to others to render.

So stay curious, look at how things are made and wonder why they are made that way and one day you too might be working for Ferrari.

At the same time, besides wearing sun-screen I would advise anyone wanting to get a job these days ~ when everyone else beside hordes of robots has identical skill-sets ~ is to see a project through to some kind of conclusion.

Few people have likely considered that a boat might fly itself from the shore to the sea prior to launch, and what was said about flight long ago still pertains: to dream up an aircraft is nothing, to build one is something but to fly one is everything.

Show people that you can do every part of that, including co-ordination of a team no matter how small, and people begin to see a way that you may produce revenue in the fullness of time by providing a competitive edge.

Which is how Adrian began, spending hours around the wind-tunnel at Southampton university and offering those skills to teams that once comprised barely a dozen folk instead of the eight hundred or more that each car requires.

For as comedian Jimmy Carr so often suggests: don't be the best, be the only.

Ed. The author's forthcoming TED talk will take place at the Cock and Bull in Cockermouth.

Look Up

I wonder how many nerds pass through security at Manchester Airport's delightful renewal of its second terminal, and are instantly transported to its 1960s heyday?

"Oh, what transports of delight..." I commented to one among its functionaries!

For here, and tastefully incorporated in a new artwork, were some among thirteen hundred lead crystal 'droplets' which formed the mise-en-scene at a place so loved by plane-spotters.

The original was installed by an emigre architect who had the royal seal of approval and died this century at the age of ninety-three.

Most we hope for nowadays is some or other piece of crap by Thomas Heatherwick.

Ed. Thomas failed to reply to one of his emails.