Twilight Flight

That's enough work for today, however, so grab a bag of popcorn and sit back and enjoy a sublime moment that I consider to be a high-water mark for my imagination in action... in the shape of a flying carpet that, were I Elon Musk, I'd recreate for my personal use.

This half-scaler however was flown a number of years ago by the inimitable Angus Benson-Blair, drone-operator to the stars. Literally... any number of proper movies you'll have seen at the cinema will have featured some or other of his footage.

If you wish to see the prototype there is one at the Helicopter Museum in Weston-super-Mare (this one in fact) and another at the South Yorks Aircraft Museum. Tell them I sent you and they'll charge extra.

Joint Operations

Readership halved last month, though at 65,000-plus views it's still a fair return for what is effectively a nobody's diary. And to to the other 65,000... go now go, walk out the blog. But I think one of the reasons might have been the drift away from boat-building and in particular the setting aside of the craft based around a seat and a pair of skis.

A French novelist once said ~ tho' I cannot remember which one ~ that a novel is never so much finished as merely abandoned and among these pages you'll see us return time and again to designs on the back-burner. It has also been pointed out that inventors often succeed with ideas they cannot but help re-visiting, so let us do a bit of that over subsequent posts.

It was such a design that called for panels of laminated backer-board to be set at right angles; so let us remind ourselves how we've done that in the past. In the photo above you can see that we've simply abutted the panels and run a filet down the joint. Once set, I shall drive skewers (tooth-picks at this scale, kebab skewers at the larger) into the outside of the join and into the abutted panel to secure.

We're a learning-by-doing blog here though, and we've seen how an advantage of backer-board is that it can be cut like plaster-board by simply running a Stanley knife down one side and then folding it until it snaps.

At that point with both plaster and backer you've to run the knife down the opposite side to free it. Where bonded with kevlar webbing instead of paper, as here, it pays to leave this in place so you're able to hang panels off a work-top to filet both sides... quick and dirty like the best sex.

This appears in the illustration below, which I've not finished off because I'd already cut one pair of panels throughout and I cannot have a pair of pontoons that are not matching, as for me it would be like turning up at the palace in odd socks. There's a kitchen-knife in the pic for the filleting, but quite honestly a wetted finger makes for a better adhesive filet altogether.

Fasten your seats-belts as we progress things, however, for nobody promised you an easy read.

Good news though in so far as there are more and more retailers of backer-board, all of which is sourced in Germany where it was invented however. B & Q retail this 12.5mm (half-inch) board at 600 x 1200 or 2' by 4'...but also do boards at twice the length that are ideal for scaling these designs upward.

Fin-ish?

The weapon of choice amongst suicidal pilots is likely to remain the illustrious 737, which has been around since the late 1960's and has few of the safeguards that the later generation of fly-by-wire airliners have.

Things move slowly in aviation circles for good reasons, but it was several years ago now that Airbus floated the idea of a single-pilot operating airliners that may also be controlled from the ground; and this can only accelerate the sentiment I would have thought.

The Boeing still has cables that connect the control-yoke to hydraulic rams to move its control surfaces like the rudder, and as I recall a manual reversion mode allowed for it to be directed by brute force alone as might your car should its power-steering pack in.

Two things of note here are that minus data from its black-box we are unlikely to know what speed it achieved in the powered dive pursued yesterday by the rogue co-pilot; data from FlightRadar in all likelihood stems from GPS data that describes geographic travel along track.

Nonetheless well before the time near-supersonic speeds are achieved, over-use of the controls on this older generation of airliner will likely see surfaces (such as the rudder missing here) torn away by the pressure.

The good news is that the deflection can do two things viz. remove a rudder-surface or else the entire tail-fin with it... as happened to the Airbus 300 flown by American several years ago. Without the fin, as any number of sharks in the South China Sea have discovered, you're going down sooner rather than later.

The other thing of note is that ~ as seen below ~ it was a passenger who pulled the control yoke backward to recover from dive. He learned to do so from watching Air Crash Investigation episodes, so maybe what's written here is not entirely wasted?

Ed. It is.

RAF Fairford

The airbase in the news in recent days for the fact it has been targeted by a foreign force and possibly the first time a facility of the kind has been since WW2. Needless to say the suspects are out on bail, as the justice system is back-logged, the prisons full; and we too busy arresting grandmothers at fossil-fuel protests.

It is all because the airfield ~ built in readiness for the D-Day landings ~ is one of a pair in Europe that can facilitate the gamut of US military power in the shape of the bombers B-1, B-2, B-52 (how does that work?) and spy-plane U2.

When I solo'ed there on June 27th of 1978 there was nobody resident except this, our humble University Air Squadron... put there for a summer camp instead of Brize Norton where we stayed, presumably because we could do less damage.

Meanwhile whilst the archives are open, on January 6th of the same year I first took to the skies in an aircraft ~ XX543 ~ that I'd see displayed at the Southport airshow practically forty years later, it having been taken into private ownership.

I mailed them at East Midlands where it was based to ask if they'd consider going for a spin?

'No' they said, as we're a bit like that in the UK and it's their train-set after all.

Squadron Leader Ron Lloyd, unbeknown to us had flown practically everything there was to fly and did so in the film 'The Battle of Britain'. Teaching me must have been a low-point in an otherwise dazzling career though when I last heard, still alive at eighty he was flying somewhere in Oxfordshire.

Happy Valley

A Group Captain based at RAF Valley has claimed the downed Hawk was steered at a field and away from built-up areas, which is remarkable for pilots hanging from parachutes. Whereas the aircraft came down exactly where you might expect it to from a right-hand circuit at such time as you'd left it to its own devices... as it was earlier this week.

Why the RAF feel obliged to promulgate this bollocks into the twenty-first century is beyond us, but then PR is foremost amongst its focus in the present day.

Remarkably a fire in the auxiliary power unit, given its location behind the rearmost seat of the cockpit, is actually anticipated to burn through the alloy rods connecting the control surfaces at the tail... they've even a checklist for it. Airliners feature this unit at the tail where it can do altogether less harm, though that's not an option on single-engine jet trainers like this where space is needed for the tail-pipe.

There is however a tradition among pilots to bask in the glory of self-sacrifice of this kind, which in fairness is imposed on them by our technically-ignorant media. Most egregious hereabouts, the crash at Stockport on the approach to Manchester airport when the captain (who survived) apparently steered the stricken aircraft away from a hospital.

For pilots there is a stark choice in the circs between flying into a brick wall or not doing so, but I'd be first to admit it probably needs a memory item to be included in most modern airlines: so paste and copy away:

    Forced Landing ....................................... Brick walls to be avoided

The Hawk however is a remarkable Northern success that has served us all one way or another for fifty years. Below a picture of the Argonaut that crashed at Stockport, which was actually a variant of the Douglas DC-4... we've also a tradition here of re-naming foreign-designed aircraft to make it look like they were designed and built in the UK. 

Ed. The hangar at the original Speke Airport ~ or at least its corollary on the other side of the original terminal ~ is converted into a gym. If we are unable to deter the Soviets, at least they'll have somewhere to buff their abs.

Choosin' Texas... Instruments

Firstly the name: the Geran-4 is named for the geranium and takes sending flowers abroad to a whole new dimension. But here's why war's different this time, breaking down what goes where, to allow it to go there:

Planform: Its delta-wing developed in Germany during WW2 closely resembles the outline of the UK's Vulcan, its most successful nuclear bomber by a margin and with a range that saw it ~ albeit refuelled ~ used on targets in the South Atlantic. Deltas combine benefits of ease of manufacture and rigidity, as Iran discovered with this.

Power: Germany also pioneered the smallest turbo-jets, although did so with more peaceful pursuits like aero-modelling in view. This one, of Chinese manufacture, is able to power the drone at well over 300 m.p.h. at altitudes of well over 25,000'.

GPS: These chips are, well, cheap as chips and a quantum leap beyond the doodle-bugs that rained on London in WW2, which were practically point-and-shoot.

Comms: Ironically, no satellite required but there if you need them courtesy of the Starlink network alternatively used for streaming Netflix. The Geran has high-speed modems that enable its cameras to transmit real-time images to an operator using ~ don't laugh ~ European SIM cards if necessary.

Networking: Phone signals can be relayed at distances of over two hundred miles to ground-stations or using other drones, so as to provide prime-time views of what you'd like to target.

Optics: The latest cameras can be directed from a great height in order to identify those targets a long way in advance.

Computing: All of this has to be co-ordinated, not least at the same time as flying the drone and navigating... and all of that is done by this.

Scale: At one end the airframes are small, providing for ease of manufacture. At the other, Russia has always had the means to produce great numbers of aircraft. A single plant in Russia assembles the airframe and everything inside at a rate of over a hundred per day, which is why thousands rain on Ukraine (and Russia) daily.

Supply-Chain: The modern world is a smorgasbord for source and delivery of parts globally, whereas German drones in WW2 were a domestic fare. Circuit boards from Texas Instruments play a part in this, though they're unlikely to have been aware of the fact.

I'd hoped the panels on the topside of the wings were spoilers of the kind used by dive-bombers like the Stuka in WW2 ~ but they simply provide access to internals, so I'm giving them nine out of ten. Nonetheless if you're thinking of upgrading your Geran-3 for a -4, Vodafone offer an unbeatable bundle this month.

Sat On Who?

We're gaining traction in our efforts to break a Guinness world record, which as it can be done from the sofa is my kind of record.

The more I think of it, the more I feel one of these inflatables should be saved for the nation and hung ~ and regularly re-inflated ~ in the National Maritime Museum  in Greenwich.

Google tells me that it is thought that 20,000 to 30,000 Vikings settled in Britain, where my home town of Shitwick bears a Viking name.

To date 17,500 refugees have arrived in the UK this year, a figure set to match the efforts of our friends from Denmark.

We went to great lengths to preserve one of their own boats for the nation down at Sutton Hoo, and if we can do it for a pile of firewood then we surely can for rubber?

Join me if you would on wasting your own life on projects of this kind.

Thanks ChatGPT for the frame. I bought a reproduction of 'The Girl with the Pearl Earring' from the Mauritshuis Museum whilst working for Dutch airline Vbird, and asked if I might have the copy hanging in a frame? The check-out lady checked with a manager. 'No you can't,' she said, 'because it's the one Vermeer used.' Passing it through the scanner at Schiphol ~ accompanied by Iron Maiden front-man Bruce Dickinson ~ I said it was the original. They all laughed, and I wish it had been.