Decidedly Sketchy

Here's what we're working toward however, the absence of booms meaning we can frame the pontoons with an 'H' arrangement having a cross-bar at either end that is unimpeded by the incursion of those booms. Incidentally it means, looking ahead, we can mount the motors and propellers at the leading edge as well as the trailing.

See what I mean from the picture below where our old friends the long clamps have stepped in to help. The timbers I have re-purposed from the previous build as with so much of my work, for greater love hath no drone than it lay down its life like this.

Those are 18mm square sections and so they stand proud of the laminated panels by a quarter-inch or 5mm, and I've used that to accommodate a bead of adhesive at either end.

The 24" cross-bars running fore and aft will be fixed separately, but for now notice how they form a slot that will retain each of the keels like a sort of dagger-board.

Notice too how thicker board would make for a more robust construction altogether besides adding more static buoyancy. In fact when my therapist asked me what I regretted in life, it was that I'd gone for 12.50mm instead of 20mm.

But then you just park it and carry on, don't you?  

Weight Loss Program

If you recall this was not going to be scaled because Türkiye ~ where I intended to do so by the seaside ~ does not do backer-boards because it's buildings are based on breeze-block and plaster instead of timber and plasterboard as are ours.

But it was also, to my mind, too heavy at nearly ten kilos (20-odd pounds) without motors and all that goes with them.

Accordingly I wondered if we could dispose of those booms, the art of design being as Steve Jobs often said being about what you can take away as much as what might be added.

So I take a hacksaw to them, and turns out we could.

Ed. What do you think? Turns out we don't care...

RAF (Un) Fairford

For whoever else feels small is beautiful, the US withdrawl of its strategic bombers likely reflects what drones did to similar assets over in Russia. The UK government has since declared the airbase safe... principally because there are no aircraft left for drones to destroy.

Welcome to the world of distributed warfare.

Pipistrel Pipped...

...but only momentarily. But all of this went literally over my head fifteen years ago, when three projects endeavoured to fly the English Channel on batteries alone so as to recreate the same sort of competition practically a century prior and at the dawn of powered flight.

Corporations at the dawn of this century are as unpopular as they've ever been, tho' not necessarily the individuals associated with their creation... Jobs, Musk et al.

But here is an example of two giant corporations in the form of Airbus and Siemens trying to quash the 'little guy' and happily losing in the process. Not that they care, but good for us all to see them fucked over even if only occasionally.

Circa 2012 in short, Airbus developed the E-Fan with which to mount the challenge and lead to a sales stream in the aftermath; while in Slovenia Pipistrel had prepared an electric aircraft to do the same thing and in fact a return trip on a single charge.

Set to do so a day or two prior to Airbus' attempt, Siemens would be 'persuaded' no doubt to go to court to prevent the use of their motor in the Pipistrel because it had not been developed for over-water use.

Nonetheless beating them all to the attempt was the venerable electrical Cri-Cri that made the return crossing, they knew not how. Fact was it had been launched over land at either end off the back of a bi-plane because as Airbus had discovered, the taxi, take-off and climb phases of a flight crucify the available charge from the get-go.

All ended happily however because Pipistrel went on to develop their own motor for the first electric aircraft to be certified in Europe, whilst variations of the Cri-Cri still remain as popular as ever amongst recreational flyers and airshows.

Airbus and Siemens folded the E-Fan project.

Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

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.