Digital Commoner

Enduring popularity of the guy on the left perhaps explained by the fact a picture's worth a thousand words, though I've put them here because that on the left has the title 'Drone for Human Carriage' and the other 'Drone Adapted for Human Carriage', which muddies the waters.

Today's round-up of downloads from the Digital Commons shows each is a perennial favourite however, along with the pictorial key-pad and a means of extending range among quadcopters by use of a 'free' wing that is able to adapt to the airflow under forward motion. I'll amend it in due course in order to clarify the method as against the means.

It was though downloaded in Kiev this past month ~ like the self-launching boat ~ and it's always gratifying to see downloads from Washington and Whitehall besides Silicon Valley and that place the US Army is based whose name I cannot recall.

The key-pad relies upon us recognising faces in place of numbers for passcodes, so that's a no-brainer as software evolves because anyone can spot a numeral but that can't be said for your grandmother rather than mine... or your cat for that matter.

So keep up... down loading.

Chinese Whisper Jet

Mentioned the other day the enduring success of smaller jet engines in the shape of turbo-props for regional airliners and miniature turbojets originally evolved for the modelling community but since co-opted for personal air vehicles.

Troubling Ukraine as I write an altogether faster form of drone, powered by such and capable of 300 m.p.h. plus even saddled with a warhead.

Germany pioneered the tech that was inevitably replicated by the Chinese at a lower cost. When I worked in Shanghai I was struck too by how I might buy a new 'boxer' type of motorcycle ~ with or without sidecar ~ for a fraction of the German original.

The reason? Captured during WW2 by advancing Russian forces they would first be reverse-engineered there before being shared with China.

Thus everything German ~ or from anywhere else for that matter ~ is not so much turning Japanese, turning Japanese (you'd really think so) so much as Chinese.

Lego, Legas, Legat?

This I like a lot... though perhaps not to the extent of the 9000+ piece Titanic that measures 1.35 metres. Unlike much else amongst Lego I suspect the demographic purchasing each differs considerably from the regular, not least because of price.

My own intro to Lego stretched only so far as plastic brick, window-frame, base and roof. And having been based flying from Billund as the museum was being built, I know that prior that the original bricks had been wooden.

Kind of ironic that what Lego produce now would be impossible without assistance from digital computers for both design and manufacture ~ whilst Concorde flew off the back of analogue computers that stretched to its fly-by-wire control system: the first fitted to an airliner, in fact.

A common misconception is the word was derived from Latin, but is actually Danish for 'Hurry up and invent the internet'.

New Sales Leeds

Wherever you go, whatever you do, be curious.

Here at Manchester's newest air terminal I spot from the gate lengths of polymer I'm sure I've seen elsewhere; and the elsewhere was watching it being loaded into a container for export to the US.

It stems from Leeds, a place which besides bequeathing us Grand Theft Auto was a place where a family man set up a factory in 1984 to produce rolls of plastic film.

Bouncing back from a flood five years later that almost literally sunk the business, they couldn't help noticing the cardboard rolls the film was stored on were prone to damp, which wrote off the entire product.

And so they created machines to extrude polymer (plastic) tubes instead. Meantime Coca-Cola asked them to supply 10,000 polymer pallets, which was how they found there were endless uses for plastic tubing.

And as ever it met a need, for the steel barriers protecting their own equipment and walkways were proving costly to repair and not tremendously good at sustaining impacts. The polymer version proved to be, to the extent it is now exported to 64 other countries beside the US.

It's used at Heathrow, as appears on the website, but they've omitted to include the use at Manchester ~ I'm guessing because the new Terminal 5 at LHR preceded T2 at MAN and they've yet to catch up.

So I've done that for them, haven't I?

A-Safe, it's called.

Parting Shot

Belatedly politicians here UK ~ most of whom can't change a light-bulb without the manual ~ have noticed UK-funded university researchers take the first chance they can to develop their ideas in the US. And who could blame them?

The government had a body it funded in the shape of the British Technology Group (or BTG) that underwrote such research besides funding ideas from the likes of me, albeit without the same sort of success as monoclonal antibodies or MRI technology.

In fact I met Margaret Thatcher's minister for technology off the back of it and may he rest in peace*. It did not stop her ~ or her devil's spawn in the shape of Tony Blair ~ from shutting it down.

Its piss-poor substitute was NESTA, which describes itself as a UK charity devoted to sustainable living, fairer starts and healthier lives viz. bollocks. It was funded at the outset by vice in the form of gambling revenue drawn from the National Lottery; whereas now despite advertising as a charity, it still draws upon government grants from the likes of us.

We R.I.P'd Graham Barker on these pages recently, and so we'll leave the last word to him regarding, shall we?

Funny how we live on in our digital traces, though...

* Ed. Although it sounds like he was killed in a drive-by shooting by the author, we should point out it was 'Big-Tech Tony' who fired the fatal shot.

Heart to Heart

And while we're talking engine efficiency, at the same time Heart Aerospace fly the largest electric airliner to date in the shape of this 30-seat regional aircraft. It began with two motors and has grown two more, and all of it in Sweden before decamping ~ as you must with these things ~ to California.

The founder did attend M.I.T. in fairness and some seven years ago teamed up with Y Combinator to develop what you see here. He does suggest in the promo vid that jet engines are equally as costly and burdensome to build and maintain compared to electric motors, which simply isn't true.

I say that because tiny jet-turbines have made remarkable strides in recent years whilst remaining relatively affordable, and turbo-propeller engines are as reliable and as fuel-efficient as ever... as witnessed by the ongoing success of the ATR-42 and -72 that I flew for a spell.

It'll be a while before they've the range to compete as well: in one ill-advised foray* I flew an ATR between Stansted and the Canaries on behalf of drunken oil-rig crew, albeit with a fuel-stop in Faro. Nonetheless in terms of economy and ease of maintenance electric airliners are looking inevitable going forward.

My one reservation relates to the under-floor battery-storage. Turbo-propeller types rarely include a central fuel-tank in order to simplify manufacture, therefore storing fuel in the wings. Any damage here and though you might get a fire it is at some remove; whereas battery fires once begun are practically inextinguishable. So it may get a little hot underfoot, but then we'll be used to that from cars by then.

At the end of the day however its a numbers game, and so we can afford a few fry-ups.

* Titan Airways, before they got posh, operated turbo-props on contracts that would include ferrying oil-rigs workers from work-base to home-base. Having spent three months dry they would stock up in duty-free to consume onboard i.e. during those eight hours we spent enroute the Canaries. The toilet was at the rear on the ATR, where I'd be told by any number of Rob C. Nesbitts that I was their 'best mate'. On arrival in Tenerife one of them stood on the top air-stair and perhaps thinking he was at home, stepped sideways onto the tarmac six-feet below.

In for the Long Haul

Although I failed as an airline pilot, the last type I flew clearly hasn't as United gets to launch it on long-haul services: like between Washington and Toulouse.

That's listed as an 08:15 hour flight and ~ at least when I was flying ~ a reserve of 00:45 minutes and diversion fuel for a 00:30 diversion is also required, in this case for an endurance of some 09:30.

That's largely down to ongoing efficiency gains on the part of turbo-fan jet engines, with a little thrown in by those winglets.

The farthest I flew ~ of an evening ~ would have been Shanghai to Phuket and as I recall that was in the region of six hours beside a diversion that would be Chang Mai or else Bangkok... although it's back in the mists of time. That was pushing it in the smaller A320, which did though have the same fuel capacity am thinking.

So we've all come a long way since then, and not least the Airbus 321 XLR.

Children, can you guess what XLR stands for?