Aircraft Carrier

Want the means of mounting the cat on the rear of the car to be 'just-so', which it isn't as yet so I'm looking for a fast means of swapping the tire from the tail-gate with the craft itself. To do so I find my inner Banksy and produce a stencil; I knew that dipping all of those half-potatoes in paint and transferring them to paper at the nursery would come in useful one day.

With that done I cut out the shape of the outermost bracket that is used to mount the spare, and transfer it to the hard-point on the underside of the centre-section.

And afterward I cut out the outline of the bracket using the jig-saw. The plan is to contrive a plug-and-play system where, with the spare off the car, the craft can be plugged into the tail-gate in this way and simply secured with bungee cord.

Having done this however and setting it up on the back end of the car, the problem is the width of the skis means that they conflict with the outline of the rear bumper.

I am loathe to add anything to this fairly elegant means of toting a maritime drone, so instead of using a spacer for instance to set the craft further aft, the alternative is to mount the centre-section the other way around with its topside plugged into the spare-wheel bracket.

This does appear to accommodate the outside dimensions of the booms, but now in order that the rear lift-motors do not clash with the rear-side of the vehicle the boat has to be lowered: reducing the ground-clearance.

Nonetheless it's looking like the preferred option and it turns out the bracket can be set to coincide with the centre of said centre-section. The only problem with this is that is the preferred location of the flight-control computer. It can though be fitted to the underside instead, which is something I've done in the past with other quads.

Of course there is an argument for simply allowing the lift-motors to raise the craft into the air, with the cruise motors at the year providing for manoeuvre. This tho' is not nearly so precise, which means that demo'ing the vehicle for the purpose of PR would be altogether more complicated, requiring a larger field or expanse of water.

Nothing in prototyping is ever straightforward however, as is plain from these posts.

Toilet Humour

I wish to thank all those who got in touch to say how worried they were that the old 'crapper' had broken down. Rest assured whilst it proved stubborn at first, I reached inside my electrical tool-box and twatted the cistern with a 2lb lump-hammer.

Despite this it remained wedded to the bowl throughout, having eventually like Rose and Jack in 'Titanic' to be separated with an angle-grinder.

Ed. Children, never do this without covering the cistern with a towel and whilst wearing both gloves and safety-goggles. Did you know that ceramic is both harder and sharper than steel? The author did after slicing his thumb open.

A Public Appeal

Searching Manchester Airport in Google Maps I note my review of December 31st of last year has been left like a 'hanging chad' with nil further, and there appears to be no means of adding a rejoinder.

Accordingly ~ but don't all do it ~ could I ask one of you, whom I'll call the 'review monitor' to post the photo above along with the following text, with italics reverted to plain text?

(Should it be rejected by AI, simply replace the word 'gay' as it refers to the above artwork with the words 'straight heterosexual'.)

Then go your way, knowing you made an old man and Manchester Airports Group very happy.

And five stars please?

Notwithstanding my mixed review after traveling at the close of 2025, using T2 recently I was delighted with the experience; not only was a coffee and croissant available for £5.50 if you looked hard enough, I bought a paperback on imminent human extinction at a book store that admittedly wants to dissociate itself from its owner W.H.Smith… and who could blame them? My experience too at the hands of the security section was altogether improved, to the extent I'll bring the family and make a day of it. And joy, looking up on leaving the section and spotting elements of the 1960s chandeliers incorporated in a gay artwork which simply lifts the spirits!

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.