Libya

In the credits at the close of the Netflix series on the bombing of Panam flight 103, the man jailed for arranging for a bomb to be placed on board appears at the steps of an Air Afriqiyah airliner upon his eventual return to Libya. Reader, I flew for that airline.

I was first aware of it as an instructor in the simulator nearby London Gatwick, this airline with number ‘9’ scattered around the tail-fin, ostensibly to celebrate the Sirte declaration of 09-09-2009. The national carrier, Libyan Arab Airlines was already to be banned from European airspace, as this one would be too ~ unless operated by a European outfit.

Accordingly I traveled to Dublin for an assessment as a captain on its fleet of Airbus 320s, which were to be operated by Irish company ASL. Aircraft were re-registered to suit, and I would be collected by these means from Gatwick and flown to Tripoli in Libya, where an airfield south of town that had been built during WW2 formed the nation’s principal hub.

We were to be accommodated in a hotel in the centre, whose uppermost floors were apparently occupied by the local militia or mafia, depending on your viewpoint, who provided protection in return. I was fairly clean-cut and well-built at the time, and in the bar you’d be clocked by fairly clean-cut and well-built characters who worked for either UK or US special forces or contractors ~ and figured you might too.

My room was on an upper floor and on hearing how occasionally there’d be people running around the corridors with AK-47s, I figured out a means of escape over the roof-tops. I had canvassed my elder brother, also an airline captain, for any advice he had on personal security and he wrote 'Tell them you're the Popular Front of Judea, not the Judean People's Front'.

The weather was spectacular, as was the food, catered for by Philippine staff who were treated with altogether less respect by the locals than we. In the evening this would be served at tables alongside the pool, the peace within the walled compound only disturbed by the occasional arrival of a US transport aircraft: what they were doing there we shall only discover when the action movie is eventually released.

The mini-bus driver was a Chelsea supporter, and we’d stop by housing estates to collect crew, where young men menaced us to some extent, just by their presence. I cracked a joke with one and he looked at me like he'd shoot me there and then on a bad day, which you get used to if you’re from Liverpool. On the way between town and airport we’d pass Gaddafi’s compound, which had been hit at night by countless cruise missiles. I asked if this had been noisy, my interlocutor looking askance at me as you might an idiot; the problem being nowadays. he went on, instead of only one Gaddafi to worry about, now they had three dozen.

We'd also pass a torture centre housed in a 1960s concrete construction of the sort Le Corbusier might have used for a French church, say. One of a pair, it was used to keep the citizenry in line. Otherwise besides the souk and an ancient fort, the town looked much as it had when an Italian colony, its parks and arcades quite stylish. The road to the airport had palm trees along its length down the central reservation and one evening one was ablaze and going up like a firework, which I guessed was what you'd expect from a trunk-full of resin.

At some stage the word went out as it once did in places like Northern Ireland that there was to be a shoot-out between rival gangs, and so we were asked to ship the aircraft to Misratah in advance of the much-anticipated showdown at the airport. At the national airline LAA left their aircraft in situ, including wide-body A330s as well as A320s, as they figured it was all talk. It wasn’t, and some billion dollars of flying real-estate went up in smoke. We had left in a hurry prior, which was quite exciting because it was possibly the only time I had jumped in an airliner to fly it visually at low level in vaguely the right direction and armed principally with Jeppesen's map.

We were not unduly disappointed to have left, apart from missing the pool and free lobster and steak, because the Romanian captain among has had been shot at from time to time whilst on the approach. It was unsurprising as the markets were awash with arms and even our young steward had a collection like you’d expect in World of Warfare. The breakfast buffet had been a thing to behold, and all of this free on top of our wages: although a tall lady, a politician and rights campaigner that I recall at the breakfasts, would soon afterward be shot dead to leave a husband and children.

The female cabin crew were largely from Tunisia next door, as they considered that women in Libya ought not to work and especially so with strange men, and moreso men as strange as I. Not long after we left too a Russian 737 crew in a nearby hotel were all shot dead, pilot and stewardesses, because the gunmen had not found who it was they were looking for and shot these people sat in the lobby instead, for they looked suitably Western enough for it to have been worthwhile.

During all of this a group of mechanics and pilots, probably at my insistence, took a bus to Sirte (the place of the declaration) where Gaddafi had come to a grisly end in a concrete sewer, as I recall, with a length of piping up his bottom. The walls were pock-marked throughout with bullet- and shell-holes, and Scud rocket-launchers sat on the streets where they'd been abandoned, so that we were able to sit in them to shout orders at each other in a Russian accent. There was a derelict food-market  I left myself into, and out back a pair of tanks that had been targeted by laser-guided bombs... holes in the roof, turrets blown clean off with the pressure and dead sheep in each for whatever reason.  

One day though we were in the descent from 35,000 feet and overhead Malta, and my co-pilot was a Libyan dual-national from Manchester; a lovely guy who I suspect will have known the Arena bomber; because there cannot be all that many Libyans in Manchester. By this stage a militia had taken over the tower in Tripoli, which was responsible for our initial descent into the Libyan airspace. Amidst instructions were people in the background shouting at him in Arabic, I doing the flying and he on the radio.

I asked him what the problem was and he relayed their insistence that we land at the new airport at Tripoli instead of our new home at Misratah. This was the military base the US transports had been using, recently pressed into action after the shoot-out at the main airport had taken out the terminal besides the national fleet.

They told him he'd be viewed as a traitor, and sounded quite cross about it so I summoned the senior to ask her if the passengers minded going to Tripoli instead. She came back and said they did mind, as half of them suspected they'd be shot on arrival. This was not a scenario we had practised during descents at British Midland in the simulator, so I said 'Fuck’ and handed the co-pilot control and got busy on a keyboard you could use to message Operations back in Dublin.

Normally it didn’t work, but happily it did and in response to my curt IF WE LAND IN TRIPOLI WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE they suggested diverting to another country and so a man who had been beginning to imagine himself in an orange jump-suit was able to execute a right turn to Djerba, a holiday resort in Tunisia, as we scrambled among paper approach plates for a suitable radio frequency. I even managed to fit in a passenger address along the lines of, 'Ladies and Gentlemen and dear children, it's your lucky day, welcome to Tunisia and we’ll arrange the buses.' I'm not sure we did, likely being advised to leave the fuckers as anyone who has flown Ryanair could guess.

On balance, good to find ourselves among holidaymakers as unexpected guests at the hotel where the cocktails must have tasted extra special. I had wanted to visit one of the most outstanding Roman remains along the coast but it was considered too dangerous: an expat and girlfriend having been shot whilst picnicking at the sea side in a place where that was not altogether the ideal pastime. Problem being the ground-crew remained in Misratah, whilst we enjoyed cocktails at the seaside.

What to do? I recall we may have re-positioned to the airfield non-radio, memory is hazy, but I did suggest to the Ops department that as we were the only ones there we could load up engines running and hot-tail it at night to Malta at 500 feet, balls out. There were few if any fighter-jets still in use as I recall, the country effectively lapsing into the sort of city-states familiar from medieval Italy. If nothing else it'd give me the chance of trying to look like Tom Cruise and saying things like 'So let's get this baby off the ground...'.

In the event they would contract one of those dodgy contractors out in the Middle East that comprise ex-special forces security people still hooked on the adrenaline and the foreign travel, beside the lucre. They were piled into a mini-bus, instructed to shut the fuck up, and as they approached each tribal check-point they'd have a driver who'd be familiar to his mates at the barrier. Driver's would be swapped out and picked up at successive points along the route to Tunisia, where I like to think the last set of sentries asked for papers please in a German accent like they would on The Great Escape.

All in all though I left Libya with a love of Libyans, and you know those robes that Gaddafi wore when he sat in his tent? I got one for my son, who must have been about three at the time, and we have it to this day. It's from Misratah, but I'd have been happy with one from anywhere.

To be continued.

What's left of airliners on the end of RPGs

Indiana Jones and the Templates of Doom

Templates for the two backer-board sheets of ply

At the outset however we need a recipe to work from, and you'll need to take one 1220 x 2440 x 25mm sheet of foam, one 120 x 60 x 6mm backer-board, four 2440 x 25mm beams, two 2440 x 25mm laths, two 100mm laths for the water-skis and one Nigella Lawson. Now set your ingredients to one side and watch Nigella Lawson on YouTube for at least half an hour, until the mixture's suitably stiff and you're in need of a cold workshop.

A Game of Two Halves

The point is, when you log with a friend and colleague have parted with a six-figure sum, money is on a sliding scale. Take footballers. When I was based at Manchester Airport I'd be returned to the apart-hotel by taxi, and one day the driver pointed out the Genting's casino along with the fact that Wayne Rooney had lost a quarter of a million pounds there the previous evening.

A word here on the direction the UK is headed. Tony Blair, when not pursuing WMDs that existed principally inside his head, liberalised the gaming laws here to allow for mega-casinos such as that in Manchester. It coincided broadly with the introduction of the smartphone, which made the UK by far and away the global leader in leading any number of people down the path of ruin; until the US happily took up the baton. Whilst not actually one of the seven deadly sins, gambling does call upon greed and sloth in large part: Tony Blair's lasting contribution to the making of modern Britain.

But flying in China I was myself practically on a footballer's salary, albeit one nearer the bottom of the Premier League struggling to avoid relegation. And what I found was, you stopped caring how much things cost on one hand and on the other began to value time over financial reward. I realise this is no consolation to the homeless, for whom time may be the last thing they'd like more of, but there it is for what it's worth. You'll be pleased to hear anyway that I squandered the most of it anyway, eventually becoming known (as may one day Wayne Rooney) as the man who had a 500-Euro note lifted from a wallet he'd left in a toilet at Brussels Airport.

But we've strayed from today's lesson haven't we kids, which is not so much how to die as how to build a flat-pack catamaran? So take up your handouts if you could as I talk you through it, and no conferring.

We set out like Steve Jobs in trying to eliminate as much of the product as possible whilst still remaining afloat, and that produced the central section set to run on skis no farther apart than they'd be were you on the Ozarks, which are a river complex in the US and not a threat off the starboard bow of the starship Enterprise. The principal drawback of which was that the craft would flop on its side at the get-go: for what it needed was wiiings.

What we therefore do over a pork pie and a coffee at the brekkie-barm is to divide the problem in two, recalling how mum used to say problems shared are problems halved (Ed. Note to kids, they're not). Accordingly we shall build the decks that stabilise the craft as a separate module that can be stored elsewhere prior to use, like at a beach-bar for example where you can select one you feel suits your mood on the day.

Absurd, yes, but then so's life.

The laths in the upper sketch will be drawn to engage the beams projecting forward in support of the skis. Alternatively you can hitch horses to them to race across the Steppes.

Folded

The only substantial reason for running a company that I had was the fact I worked as a contract airline captain, my accountants Intega in Hertfordshire doing a sterling job of filing them with the revenue for countless years.

Then when the originator of the Go Aero challenge in California required teams to be incorporated ~ a condition that they sensibly dropped in their more recent challenge ~ it made eminent sense to continue filing.

Not least too, with its ongoing record of the loan afforded it by its director, Muggins, it was a means by which my own financial contribution might be reflected when Elon Musk came beating a path to my front door.

Then eventually after my patent agent presented me with a bill for £350 eighteen months after his auditors discovered from records that it had never actually been issued, I decided running a company ostensibly by myself that did little but accrue costs (not least for those annual filings)... I decided a reality check was due.

On top of this the current government in the UK is casting about for means to fund its own lavish spending plans and historically they have chosen businesses to foot the bill, especially smaller companies less able to pay it because they are unable to make the same noise. It has thus become steadily more onerous to set up and to  operate a company of whichever sort, not least one making no money.

Every means of deriving government grants or funding of any sort however has to be predicated nowadays on some form of incorporation, principally because those making the decision will be unlikely to know little or anything about the technology behind whatever is being proposed; the UK bent on destroying the state education system, industrial base and apprenticeships that went with it. Chances of finding the lathes, milling machines or power pillar drills which I used in any school hereabouts? About nought to nil.

So for the record, on paper I've spent £80,739 to build a half-scale personal flying machine and to enter it in a competition in California in 2020; and then build three more different types that we were able to get airborne; then use the remnants on a series of maritime drones that may or may not see the light of day beyond pages in the illustrious boat design.net online.

Looked at it that way, it's not too bad, for BAE Systems would have spent that on a buffet whilst they were thinking about it. On the other hand I could have bought  an apartment and rented it out: considered by the English as a lifetime achievement worthy if not of award, then at least an appearance on a home-improvement show.

Then again I doubt I'd be witnessing the 5,000-plus views that the blog is garnering ~ albeit bots feasting on a literary carcass ~ were I to get you exercised instead about installing new boilers and tenants behind with their rent.

It was George Orwell who said he had never met a landlord who did not hate his tenants, and like him I'd prefer to be remembered for words than for where I lived.

Ed. if you love someone, set them free from reading self-indulgent crap like this.

Vee-wee Airman

What's special about the vaporware above? Correct. Nothing. What it is though is an attempt by the firm that practically invented popular motoring to break into a field it thought was about to replace it. Which to make you feel better, just shows how the brightest minds are as dim as yours or mine.

Okay, mine. But when I flew on contract in Shanghai, beside pilots or the teachers of English those I most met were consultants from the auto-industry teaching China how to build cars at scale. In fact VW had the largest manufacturing plant of any of them. Although by the time they came up with what you see above ~ ten seconds of work on ChatGPT nowadays ~ sales of VWs to a burgeoning middle class in China were collapsing.

It happens time and again with legacy industries, having the rug pulled from under their feet. One reason is that essentially all they know about is cars (or negatives in the case of Kodak) and thus are unable to see the true potential of anything else. A substantial secondary point of failure that the West is most prone to however is the status quo viz. the primary concern of people running the likes of Kodak or VW is to hold out until such time as the pension bears fruit... and the best way to do that is to venture nothing, and spend the minimum.

What spending the minimum meant for VW was asking people pioneering eVTOLs in China to come up with a 'me-too' model of their own. This was a model pursued by Audi and Porsche, incidentally, beside VW. All of these models failed because they did not work at all well as aeroplanes, even in digital modelling of how they might perform in terms of range, endurance and returns on investment.

For at the end of the day, you have to have lived both cars and aircraft as I've done and continue to do: but then fuck, what do I know? There are specific end-uses for flying cars, like the doctor who flies a Pivotal personal air vehicle because (a) he is rich and (b) lives in the middle of nowhere, but the majority of us live in cities and it is in such places that cars have evolved to a level of supreme practicality.

Crewed aircraft by and large, and especially in cities, are not really practical at all. Where they are practical is in isolated environments that can be tightly regulated, like Manchester Airport along the road here or military airbases in whichever part of the world. Elsewhere, should your car have been vandalised or appear to have been dented by one of the neighbours, you get in and go to work. Doing that in a 'flying car' within the urban landscape has got death written all over it.

What most impresses me is the almost messianic faith in people developing eVTOLs in how they have eliminated what were once considered to be the risks involved in taking flight, and as PAVs develop you will see that air-crashes become as routine as car-crashes, and equally entertaining on YouTube.

The mistake VW made was not, instead of seeing flying cars replacing what we have now, seeing how electric vehicles would do that instead.

Two differences between the East and the West. Firstly they have governments that know what they want technically whether in Japan, Korea and China and promote it to the max until they dominate the market. Whereas we're good at law and advertising and buying what they produce... BYD already being the market leader here in the UK.

Secondly, Europe's obsession with saving the planet has handed the EV market on a plate to China, by destroying what we currently have as fast as possible without the know-how or investment to provide for any alternative.

The UK produces just 1% of the world's carbon emissions, thus we're the passenger on the Titanic baling it out with a bucket instead of accepting fate and enjoying the music while it lasts.

Boatdesign.net Gain

I get a lovely email from Jeff to say he's still at the helm and that his outlook is fair, southwest veering westerly 4 or 5, occasionally 3 later. Moderate. Showers. Good, occasionally moderate... which is good to hear.

And turns out the latest upload had not been rebuffed, so much as lost in the wash.

And after all when you think about it, nowadays any number of designs are renders in wholly digital form, like the one above: I'd love one, you'd love one, but Monday morning is suggesting that plywood is more likely to be our lot in life.

How many episodes in life turn on misconception or misadventure? I've a great love for the works of Thomas Hardy and there's the bit where the guy slips a love letter under Tess of the D'Urberville's door; except it slips underneath the carpet instead and the fate of both are sealed.

Tess goes on to an early appointment with the hangman's noose and Angel Clare, her feckless husband, dies in penury designing maritime drones.

The End.

Boeing, Boeing Gone.

In both cases these aircraft losses occurred in the dead of winter, the one some ten days prior New Year and the other not quite that long afterward and I recall working and living in London at the time and even now, where I was when I heard of each.

I must have been working late and likely at WANG computer at the time off Baker Street, in a traffic-jam down Mayfair, when news came through of the loss of flight 103 operated by PanAm: Netflix taking you back there, half a lifetime ago. The one connection I have is having worked as a captain in Libya, where it is thought that the plan to bring down the airliner originated. It was undoubtedly the more riskier of contracts, my briefing on the inaugural flight out of Tripoli interrupted by news from the cabin that a man waving a gun had come to see off a friend. Reader, I let him.

Kegworth I knew of more directly, having got that command on the same type and at the same time not that long afterward. The young man in dispatch at Heathrow in the old Queens Building I liked for his humour. One day passing me the papers he let know that he'd woken with a dead arm and therefore decided to masturbate for it felt, as he told me by way of pre-flight briefing, like someone was doing it for him. And for aircrew it's exactly what you want to hear at 05:30.

The aircraft broke into three pieces on the motorway embankment, the rearmost inverted and from which he emerged to wander dazed down the carriageway in the aftermath. The airline's proprietor offered him a job for life, or at least until budget airlines meant the carrier was absorbed into British Airways; whereupon we would meet again at a book fair in Islington.

The captain was apparently known as "Hunt the Cunt" and the fact the crew did not approach the flight-deck to divulge conflicting information as to whether the right of left engine had failed was attributed at least in part to this. That said there are two things I would offer in his defence.

Firstly, few airline captains are particularly liked by crew. Generally they're either good at flying, or else liked by everyone, but rarely combine the two... although a precious few managed to. On gaining a command at this legacy airline (as against $10,000 dollars in the right pocket elsewhere in the world), I was congratulated for becoming 'The least popular person on the aircraft'.

A role I feel that I fulfilled admirably. Secondly however there was no clear way of telling at the time which was right and which left: the senior wondering whether it meant facing backwards from the galley or else the same way as the passengers ~ so maybe what the flight-crew was saying over the PA was correct after all?

Thus Flights 103 and 092 (the shuttle I operated countless times to Belfast) would be separated by barely a fortnight. And the only connection I have now, these many years later, is the fact that on occasion I drive a truck past the village of Lockerbie, which is practically alongside the principal route between London and Glasgow.

The only detail I can fault the Netflix series on is the fact heavier parts of the aircraft drop first, and not later. At the time the primary radars were analogue and not digital, so controllers knew the aircraft had broken up because its single radar return fragmented into several more 'blobs' on the screen.