Civil Aviation Authoritarianism

I'm a follower of YouTubers in the US, in the main, who experiment with the means by which new methods and materials (principally electric) enable all sorts of outlines that might have been tried and subsequently discarded in the past due infeasibility. Note however in so doing they would have to break all six UK CAA stipulations to do so.

As influencer Katie Hopkins has pointed out, the one person least likely to follow the rules is the one most likely to be using drones for illicit purposes like ferrying drugs into prisons. There are though two more, that being casual users who might otherwise be flying drones; and innovators experimenting with them in the way that Frank Wang did by way of going on to supply 90% of the global market.

Regardless of the fact that the military in the UK forewarn of a critical lack of people ~ generally young white men, despite how distasteful that would appear ~ able to operate drones in the way Ukrainians do in order to eliminate up to 50,000 enemy combatants each month.

The pic below illustrates the effect the CAA has, like most other UK organisations, in crushing entrepreneurial endeavour from the get-go. The team is rightly proud of their ongoing efforts to break an existing world record relating to radio-control aircraft... except for the pilot, who they have had to anonymise in case men in black descend from Gatwick to arrest them for Loitering with Intent:

Cor... tina!

Stars of the show at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo and elsewhere have to include the three dozen drones tasked with providing first-person-view footage at speeds of upto eighty miles per hour: the one up top not a spider but a quad that is about to track a man on a luge. With the exception of more leisurely sports such as curling, they are following everything else at close quarters.

The last time the Winter Olympics took place here there were ten cameras, but now eight hundred follow proceedings. The broadcaster discourages equipment providers from advertising their wares, so we'll never know whose they are... those developed for tracking FI cars recently at Silverstone were custom-built and based on those that are currently breaking speed records.

A mention meantimes for one of Great Britain's Womens Skeleton team, one of whom [inset] in the form of Laura Deas opened our local branch of Aldi, instead of a baldy mayor. Actually he was there, but it was less obvious why Laura should have left off training in Gloucestershire to visit our humble ~ and fairly shitty ~ town. The answer was that Aldi sponsor Team GB, and provide an Olympian for every opening.

A lovely girl whom I offered a bag of greens, provided free to the store's first twenty customers.

Laboured

If you want a guide to the British class system, this week has been as good a guide as any. Top, the arrest of Lucy Letby, a nurse who had already emailed Cheshire's constabulary offering to assist.

MO in this case (as she's working class and living with her parents):

Body cams, handcuffs, stab vests will be required. As large a team as poss please on the day. Park well away and rush around in order to alert all of the neighbours and provide the best poss footage on Netflix. Apprehend suspect in bed, ideally, for dramatic effect. Repeat, three times in all, using same technique, especially as she has offered no resistance whatsoever. Consider use of taser.

And in contrast, the apprehension of one of those elected to 'represent' the working class (living with his husband in Camden Town when not weekending in the country house instead):

Allow three days prior at least in order to facilitate shredding of documents and removal of electronic devices. Arrive discretely in black limousines so that it looks like a regular collection for business at Westminster. Provide door-step 'bobby' to reassure the international press that we do things properly and in a civilised manner here in the UK. Dress code formal, ideally dark grey suits please? Knock and wait for the butler before presenting ID and asking if it suits the lord if you pop in for a moment, with the proviso we can come back later if staff are shredding.

Out-ranking Netflix's viewing stats on Nurse Letby tho' are the Crewkerne Gazette's with its refreshing use of AI to bring politicians to account... as they're no good at doing so themselves [inset].

In contrast to Lord Mandelson's, Letby's guilt looks less certain each passing week, and despite the case being the most confounding you could imagine deliberating as a juror I'm guided by the fact that we're still great at miscarriages of justice.

But at least we can still get up on our digital soap-boxes and complain at this sort of thing... which is why I am happy to stay here and enjoy the Marmite.

Ed. He's not, he just left it too late to live anywhere else.

3/8ths Cirrus

A photo of the Cirrus of a post or two ago, and clearly taken by someone with more than a phone in their pocket; from which it appears more than 50% of the airframe is missing, along with fibreglass fairings around each of the wheels. In contrast the undercarriage appears largely intact, although the tyres seem to have been charred. It is possible that they have been involved in the discharge of electrical current, the high-tension cables that may have been a factor conducting upto 400,000 volts.

I Can't Believe It's Not Beta

Beta's Alia aircraft appear to have flown more electrical air miles than anything else out there, and to the stable they added a version stripped of all four lift motors so as to retain only the cruise motor at the rear: apparently it's called an 'airplane' if you do this. But 'one airframe, two configurations' is an ingenious economic model and one that is encouraging should we be able to evaluate two forms of catamaran, which in one case is only able to cruise on water and in another is able to hover and fly in ground-effect by adding as few as two lift motors.

8/8ths Cirrus

I do this because (a) views spiked when I commented on the Air India crash and my gut instinct that it was a pre-meditated suicide ~ if only as I know from experience that life as an airline pilot is not all the cakes and ale it appears to be and (b) I once applied to join the Air Accidents Investigation Branch... a club I would never join if it would have the likes of me as a member.

But air crashes don't really jibe with the TikTok generation (us), who want answers same day, or at least prior our mid-morning cappuccino on the next. And so I shall throw my deer-stalker hat into the ring, if I may, because the above report from the most reliable of sources as this stage of the game suggests the accident happened after the emergency parachute was deployed. And here it is:

Note that it's on the ventral upper side, and unseen here once deployed it suspends the aircraft level using one cable as shown and a pair attached each side of the fire-wall ahead of the occupants.

Moving on to weather (a) the visibility was decidedly poor and driving thereabouts in a truck at the same time I was happy to be there and not in a light aircraft, for I've spent many hours negotiating murk in those circs and ~ not knowing whether or not you might be dead in the next ~ it was never pleasant. And (b) it was very windy, as the suspension of those heavy steel cables shows (and it helps to have spent teenage years living a stone's throw from one such pylon; they crackle a lot in fine rain too):

It was thus, as Poirot would say during the mise-en-scene, a decidedly grim day to have chosen to fly if ~ as is so often the case ~ it was to be pursued by determined efforts to stay in visual contact with the ground. Next to the route:

What would be really useful knowing is where the two on board were headed, if at all. If you're headed for some place north of here and have begun to have second thoughts then there is Leeds off to the north-east closest, and of course Manchester to the southwest... although both are largely devoted to commercial traffic, so that airports like Manchester's Barton would appear a safer harbour altogether.

The area though is key, and if you want to see the remains of a B-29 then these are the moors to visit. Any number of airliners in the past came to grief descending for either Manchester or Burtonwood, as you can see these two airliners doing prior to a left turn to line up with the south-westerly runway at the former. I've done so more than a few hundred times and it's invariably a bit of a butt-clencher watching that radio altimeter sprung into life by the high ground beneath.

More to the point though is the fact (a) just about where the aircraft is, is signed as being the highest motorway in England at 1220 feet: a regular pub-quiz question. And (b), that M62 appears on the left of the aircraft as it flies west, presumably in search of clearer weather (but not necessarily so, until we know more). All aircraft are piloted principally from the left seat ~ though helicopters the right, but they've always been on the spectrum ~ which is where you want to put any reliable means of finding your way around. To the extent the joke was IFR meant not Instrument Flight Rules, but 'I Follow Roads'.

Turning to the scene of the accident...

...it caught my eye principally for those drapes, which look like those the police use to shield cameras, except that in this case it appeared to have blown away. But no, mes amis, it is the deployable parachute of which we spoke. And so my first thought was maybe the aircraft had collided with the pylon itself? It appeared undamaged however, and the utility company reported no disruption to electrical supplies. Let us turn then to the aircraft itself:

I've seen lots of these and you can on what remains of that B-29 nearby: a blade of the (alloy) propeller contorted in a way that suggests it was running and possibly so at cruise RPM at point of impact. It's one for slo-motion analysis that we're unlikely ever to see, few people being as weirdly curious as me; but if as the report above suggests they merely dropped from the albeit uncomfortable height of a half-pylon, you'd think that the pilot might by then have silenced the engine. In that case, you'd see a blade simply bent backward like one of Uri Geller's spoons.

I don't want to go there, but life's not a box of kittens, and from this scant evidence it would appear that beside the empennage (tail feathers, effectively) missing, most of the upper part of the fuselage would appear to be too; although it may simply be crushed. Cirrus recommend anyway that parachutes be used only in extremis, viz. engine failure or uncontrollable flight, ideally from above 2000' to allow sufficient time for deployment.

We've nothing from Air Traffic Control to corroborate; but declaring an emergency if flying through murk perilously close to high ground is recommended by everyone but practised by few. Consider it a form of mental health for aviators: few want to admit to the issue, but many die as a consequence.

Given the evidence I'd suggest Colonel Collision, with the Cable, in the Mountains?

I mean, WTF? Well it's a cable-cutter, and fitted often to both top and bottom sides of helicopters precisely because of the number of times they've come to grief flying in such conditions as those on the Pennine hills yesterday morning. Few helo pilots have or require an instrument rating, which is why (a) they creep alongside roads in bad weather and (b) they kill celebrities who view them as safe*.

At speed cables make a clean cut... as hopefully do cable-cutters. Again however this is idle speculation in tragic circs, though as and when I pass myself you'd all be welcome to dance on my grave (see Ticketmaster) for all it matters. I do though want the AAIB to read this and beat their breasts for having lost one of the more entertaining air-crash investigators out there.

And if you like it, don't put a ring on it, but forward it to someone you love... it was Marcel Proust who said there was nothing so enjoyable as settling down to a coffee and sponge-cake with a newspaper and reading about death and destruction beyond the fragrant flower-beds of his garden in Paris.

* I was once tasked with flying Stevie Wonder in a turbo-prop from Heathrow to I remember not where. Suspicious of any aircraft with propellers instead of jets, he declined the charter at the last moment. "So who told him?" I demanded of the dispatcher.

One Way Ticket to the Blues

I didn't think people in the UK gave a second thought to the prospect of war, though recent surveys suggest increasing numbers of them do. Two developments over the weekend worth droning on about: first, the speed record for quads that is bouncing between individuals in Australia, Switzerland and South Africa was just broken again and second, the UK begins to manufacture the above drones on British soil because the factories in Ukraine ~ and I don't want to worry you unduly here ~ are a natural target for daily dive-bombing by Iranian-designed one-way drones.

What is interesting from my own point of view is whether egg preceded chicken viz. did record-breaking quads copy what was done in Ukraine, or did the latter (and the South Koreans, as per prior post) copy what seems to be the best possible design?

This last month though was the anniversary of the UK's '100-Year Partnership' that is a part of the £4.5 billion pledged already, which includes manufacturing munitions here... and these are munitions and not something estate agents use on mansions.

Among the things to ponder are whether '100-year' agreements are not as silly as the '1000-year' regimes that generally die in less than 10; whether calling the war 'illegal' matters in view of the fact 'legality' is merely an extension of power by other means; and whether the people of Britain have a say* in whether they want to join WW3? Can't we just watch highlights on catch-up, like Strictly Come Dancing?

* No, in a nutshell. We in Britain love doing stuff on the cheap and contracting other people to do the dying is economically and politically preferable. It's what Kipling called the 'great game' and while Kipling is out of favour, war is apparently not.