FWD Thinking?

Nothing I like more really than a derelict car or aeroplane, and discovered this one down the side of a Staffordshire warehouse yesterday. If you're reading this abroad then you may have heard of a Staffordshire Terrier... but this is not one of those.

It is in fact a late-model Mini, my first love whom I affectionately called EEK525F for that is what it said on the front. But don't it just get you thinking about transverse transmissions? It was designed by Alec Issigonis, whose father hailed from the west coast of Turkey at such time as it was still Greek; a shipbuilding engineer, he moved to London where Alec was born.

Fresh from designing the Morris Minor ~ the first British car to sell over a million ~ he would introduce what was originally called the Morris Mini Minor in 1959. Arriving at the same time as both me and the Beatles, the world has never really recovered since. The brief was a car under ten feet long with a 10-inch wheel in each corner, suitable for people wearing pink mini-skirts and knee-high boots: the fashion among men at the time.

There is however a sinister twist: it practically introduced engines squeezed into the space above sideways. It was utterly horrendous to work on yourself, and would be replaced in my affections by a Morris Minor pick-up with a canvas roof and tail-gate whose principal facility was the fact my friends could sit on the wheel arches at back when returning from the pub, relieving their bladders out the rear-end on the move: and you don't see that in the BYD adverts, do you?

Ford however took one apart, decided the company must be losing money on each sale ~ which they were ~ and responded with the Cortina. All five versions of this, between 1962 and 1982, were rear-wheel drive (and interesting fact, the head of Ford Europe at the time lived two doors up three doors top from me in Hatfield and enjoyed an evening of fine wines, food and discussions about the Anglia from time to time).

But here's the thing: put the engine the other way around, as in every model of the Cortina, and everything falls naturally into place. The radiator is at the front, where it needs cooling in the draught. Then there's the engine, followed by clutch and then gearbox... just about where it needs a lever for you to change gear. Set off and the weight is thrown on the rear wheels, where the traction is required, and hit a corner and with a bit of luck you can drift it out instead of spinning it into a railing as I did once with my glorious Sierra 2.7 litre V6 company car.

The modest reduction in length of the car ~ which nobody's bothered about now ~  meant however that any number of manufacturers went down this route, including a reluctant BMW once it had taken charge of a revived Mini. And what this meant was that whereas everything was easily fixed and replaced on a Morris Minor, which you could literally stand in alongside the engine-block, was that maintenance required a workshop visit. And has, ever since, and even moreso.

But it's Easter, and so gather round.

Story! Story! Story!

Oh come on, alright then. I thought I had it somewhere, but can't find the printed photo of the De Havilland Trident sat on the former airfield in Hatfield before it was broken up for scrap with a jack-hammer. I let myself in, for what beats a derelict car but a derelict airliner? And it's rows of seats, still there in 1970s orange! And the smell always the same, a kind of musty vapour that mingles with the memory of the thousands of passengers this aircraft must have flown to destinations like the Costa Brava... shiny, happy people holding hands.

But come closer. I was tasked with my ground-school for the 737 at East Midlands airport with the legendary John Kinsella who we'd break in the pub with for lunch and go to it in the afternoon fuelled off the back of a few pints of bitter and a Scotch chaser... look away now if you're flying Ryanair tomorrow.

But there had been a derelict Vickers Viscount on the far side of the field, which was used by engineers for various training tasks related to maintenance; the aircraft as was so often the case having crashed and been written off. Sadly in this case, both airliner and its young co-pilot had been written off.

One evening the master-switch having been flicked, the last engineer out the house looked back to see the cabin lights still on... so let himself back and walked up front in order to throw the switch which he figured he'd omitted.

And there, just long enough for him to appreciate what it was, the apparition of that same figure sat again momentarily in the right-hand seat before vanishing back into eternity.

Fuck.

Ed. The Mini popularised the sub-frame, the foremost one of which in the picture. It meant the body was a monocoque, whereas the Morris Minor had floor-panels that could be removed. The author once removed that on the passenger side, which meant they got wet every time he drove through a puddle: the fastest way of losing a girlfriend that he knows.

Unalloyed Joy

Pleased with how the plywood version of the tail-gate adapter is looking, and let junior take it to school this morning for a 'show and tell'. In fact it went on, he says, to come third in handiwork: the picture on his phone showing entries on display and suitably labelled too:

    1st        Class 9A        D. Hoskyns      Base for bed-side lamp.

   2nd       Class 8C        L. Blythe          Mahogany fruit-bowl.

   3rd        Class 9B        C. Hilton          Means of deploying maritime drone.

Though I'd done a good deal of it so as not to distract him from online gaming, I could not have been prouder!

Unalloyed Misery

Talking yesterday about aluminium though, weren’t we? Well in a news feature this morning on Radio Four, a nice man who runs the UK’s one remaining smelting plant says that what has occurred in the Gulf has added 40% to the price on top of whatever stemmed from ongoing war in Europe.

Customers are urging them to increase output, except they cannot because beyond the hydro power they use, the UK has among the most expensive energy markets anywhere ~ thanks again, Margaret. Aluminium is known as the 'energy’ metal for the amount required to make it.

Steel is something else, the few remaining plants we have being outdated, foreign-owned and unable to smelt raw product as against scrap; which given a bonfire the Scout movement could probably manage. Remaining facilities will be kept open by subsidy, which usually lasts long enough for nobody to notice the eventual closure. Ideally they’ll brand support with a name like ‘Phoenix’ although ‘Albatross’ would probably be a better choice.

And then there’s food, the bulk of which we import in order that we can enjoy year-round salad with crushed avocado on sour-dough bread. As a consequence, one in five trucks here shuttles food, likely returning empty so as to use more diesel; given that it too is now exorbitant.

On a steely job yesterday ~ unloading sinks from a Chinese container ~ I was asked if I was ex-Army, being the only driver ever to assist the heavy lifting. Turned out my newly-met colleague was... tho' asked were he ready for a call up now reserves are on notice, he said he wouldn’t fight for a country he no longer believes in.

Given how successive governments have treated his like, I’m not really surprised.

Ed. And breeeeeeeeeathe. Crushed avocado on soda-bread for me too, please?

Wooden Wonder... ing

Why though wood? Told you, didn’t I, to look at how things are made and ~ if you’re a young person looking for a better means of promotion than a LinkedIn subscription ~ figure out why they’re made that way too. Take a look at this seat I shot an image of recently. That bar nearest floor-level is the means to restrain the under-seat baggage stowed there by whoever is sat behind.

I’ve probably seen three different types. One an extruded section of aluminium bent to the required outline; another cast as a single component; or that here assembled from stock lengths of tubing joined by connectors. Don’t worry too if your fellow passengers take exception at you taking pictures ~ tell them as I did that you’re a foot-fetishist.

You might be aware that the series of drones I produced and flew ~ or got someone to do so ~ generally comprised a space-frame made from such tubes and connectors, with the intervening spaces filled with foam sheet to prevent shear. And which other frames were filled out like this, children? Correct... wattle-and-daub timber-framed buildings in the Middle Ages!

Nonetheless I abandoned alloys when it came to the boats because (a) they involved a long drives to collect and (b) the war in Ukraine upped prices considerably because the bulk of it is sourced in Russia... the effect of tariffs and sanctions generally being global economic whack-a-mole.

So that’s one sign of the times, and another is that foam-and-ply aircraft appear to be the go-to method of raining destruction in both Ukraine and the Persian Gulf as of late.

And so I use wood not only because it's cheap, readily available and ecologically-friendly but also because there is a deal of satisfaction in doing so. Riva’s wooden speedboats that plied the Italian lakes were probably the pinnacle of boat-building, and likewise the Mosquito that De Havilland produced in WW2 was unique in being built almost entirely in wood (for the reason back then, as now, metal was scarcer with steel going into bombs and alloys into aircraft carrying them).

Ironically at secondary school I much preferred working in metal, which neither warped nor split. I still have the cannon I made at school under the tutelage of Mr Powell. What I did with this was scrape the phosphate of any number of matches and pack it into the barrel before inserting red-hot wire into the vent: with spectacular results. This we did in the workshop, whereas nowadays I suspect there is no woodwork, no metalwork and no teachers allowing cannons to be fired off in class.

Which is why at the possible dawn of WW3 we are ~ as in two previous ~ up shit creek.

You had to walk through the wood shop to access the metalwork, and the smell of fragrant hardwoods on the rack was divine ~ sorry about that, orang-utans.

Carrier Advice

The attraction of a wearable frame that electrification was beginning to look possible was that, from my own point of view, it didn't require a trailer. Once it was obvious that some from of airframe was going to be required, the latter means to haul ass was to become compulsory.

If you look at any of the personal air vehicles which abound in experimental form at least, all require a great deal of weight to be carried whether in connection with one such airframe, or else by the human frame itself. That human frame only relatively lately evolved in an upright form, leaving backache among its commonest ailments.

Furthermore the worst possible means of sustaining high G-force ~ like for instance during a heavy landing that includes the weight of an aircraft ~ and that's you laid up for a long time with a crushed vertebra or two. This is why strapping propellers to your outline is best left to AI and the short video format.

At least it planted the idea, and years later it's good to come back to being able to go trailer-less and ~ as so many do with bikes ~ hit the road with a rack out back. That said there can't be many sales staff asked how the vehicle enables a maritime drone launch besides the school-run?

It's taken the best part of the day to mock this up in laminated foam left over from a previous build, but it answered all of the questions in my head and is ready to be put into concrete form ...I'll pass the pattern seen below to my CAD/CAM people for a 3-D printout the carbon-fiber division can use for a bespoke product.

Ed. What he means is he'll be using that plywood left over from fixing the toilet, but doesn't need the competition knowing that.

Aircraft Carrier 2.0

Eat your heart out, Adrian Newey, you're not the only one who prefers using paper to computer screens for drafting modifications to racing cars or maritime drones!

Can't believe I cut a hole in the drone to accommodate carriage on a tail-gate, and albeit at first reluctantly I've gone to work on the adapter I said I'd never use.

Bolted in place of a spare wheel, the back-end of the boat's centre-section will slide into place with a satisfying 'action' which would make IKEA themselves proud.

And do you remember the centre-section we rejected because it was too big?

You know, the one painted Kermit-green that you said looked shite?

We may be able to use it instead of plywood left over from our work on the toilet, Gromit!

Sent to Coventry?

Rarely engage in public discourse and like Howard Hughes prefer to stay inside with pizzas slipped under the door, but have chipped in on the prospects of UAM as agin those for drones generally. UAM is, or was until AI came along, what investors were most exercised about at least until war broke out (again) in the Middle East.

Where aviation is concerned, we live in a mass market world in which you're either big or else nothing at all... whether that applies to manufacture or services. Look at what you use on a daily basis to get by, and who owns and operates it. Aviation is no different, and the reason for instance the world's richest man is in a flame-war of his own with one among Ireland's richest: who runs the third most profitable airline.

The vast majority of people will never fly in any shape or form throughout their lives or else if they do, it will be in an airliner. General aviation is dying on its feet, sport aviation thrives if only on a largely kit-built basis. If air taxis are to succeed on any scale it will be in China, for the reason that aviation has largely just opened up, the space is available for infrastructure and there are no holds barred in terms of both the planning and regulation required.

My father was a telephone engineer and bemoaned how places like Ireland could go down the digital route altogether faster because they were not ham-strung with the existing technology. Africa went a step further and skipped land-lines altogether in favour of going direct to mobile (or cell).

China has money and means to skip that bit requiring helicopters and do the same with the electrical transition, whether that applies to VTOL types or those airplanes now able to lift off and land on the sort of shorter runways that places like the UK is closing down at pace: desperate as it is for revenue from retail parks and housing.

A case in point of how the UK has turned itself deliberately, starting with Thatcher's efforts to sell off the family silver, from a manufacturing to a servant economy that services the whims of nations and wealthy individuals from elsewhere. Flying taxis fit into this nicely, catering to one more of those whims the world neither needs nor can afford.

Thus it was that talented and well-qualified architects show-cased its 'urban airport' concept in Coventry, backed by 'green' grants that look daily sillier as the prices rise at the petrol-pumps and we all turn off our gas-boilers in favour of an extra layer. The city of Coventry proved two things in WW2 viz. the effectiveness of bombs and guided missiles in destroying a place but ~ in the aftermath at Dresden ~ it's total incapacity to destroy the will of a nation in their defence.

The local council and government thus fell over themselves to provide land for the 'world's first vertiport', selecting an edge-of-town car-park and displacing its clients without I am guessing, a by-your-leave. The vertiport I suspect once the lager had been drunk and the finger-food consumed would like Thatcher's Britain remain as a monument to making the country great again, but instead reverted to a car-park.

In fact it is perfectly placed on the southern edge of the ring-road for town-centre and railway station adjoining... which is why it will be full of cars daily instead of a tent designed for electrical helicopters arriving and departing one at a time.

And here's the rub. Most people live in cities, and of those most in the suburbs and most have a car to maybe get to places like vertiports to take a flying taxi; except now there is nowhere to park, like a next-century version of the school-run.

So what does Daddy do? He says "Fuck it kids, let's drive to Disneyland and stop at a Maccies instead, eh?".

My co-correspondent is based in Holland and not Oz as I thought. Love the Dutch, the only people prepared to co-invest in the company that supplies the world from Taiwan with the chips it increasingly relies upon.

But I worked there as an Airbus captain at V-bird, a partner of an airline Dutch-bird. It went bust, as do most airlines unable to launch themselves into the mass-market stratosphere ~ but after it did, Dutch journalists wrote with some credibility that the two airlines had principally been a perfect means of laundering very large quantities of cash for (mass-market) drug cartels.

Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap appears to work for drones in particular in an uncertain world, but less so for taxis which like the defunct high-speed rail-link would mostly have been used to ferry the wealthiest football-fans between London and the north, where the better teams play.

From the get-go there's always been more of the smell of money round aircraft than of castor oil, or more lately kerosene.

But combine the mass-market with computers and you've got what the airlines call 'yield management', meaning prices for EVERYTHING fluctuate with demand; see below for cost of a helicopter shuttle to the British F1 Grand Prix some three months away and ask yourself if that'll change if electrified?

It's one small race-meet for a man, but one giant spell on a sun-bed for humankind.

Ed. The founder of Vertical Aerospace was inspired to produce eVTOLs by one such helicopter ride whilst attending an F1 race in Brazil... maybe tho' he'd just Googled 'is driving across rio de Janeiro dangerous'.