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?

Kit Cat #13

Kicking this around gives us a feel for what it most needs; first up a pair of wing-spars. I've extended the laths around the back end to suit, and up front I'll drive a dowel ~ or in time be carbon-fibre rod ~ through each lat and boom to maintain a level profile.

Intend to reduce the seat-back to make it flush with the decks, and I shall probably leave the 'parcel-shelf' off too because it's me who gets to say so.

Also I shall reduce the size of the seat by around half to effectively shift it forward, and cut the foot-rest in half to raise it clear of the waterline at a comfortable slant.

We're able to do that too because with the wing-spars in place the parcel-shelf and foot-rest are not so essential to lending a virtual box-section to the centre structure. 

Want each pontoon to be a separate module ideally, with own motor and ancillaries.

Ed. Then again, he might do none of this.

Don't Dodge this Viper

What more could you want from a video than a hand-cranked jet-engine in the back garden of an old man with his Austin 1100 in the background? *

What is great about it is why anyone would want an engine just to fire it up now or then; but that's a pastime that's going nowhere thankfully.

The Rolls-Royce Viper, co-opted from Armstrong-Siddeley, was used for nearly sixty years in aircraft like the Jet Provost and Hawker-Siddeley Dominie: each of which I shared circuits with around RAF Finningley.

Ed. Naked women?

Kit Cat #12

Immensely please with this back-end as it happens. There's a lot to be said for sloth and I've gone for the easiest and quickest means of mounting a pair of motors and pusher-props that takes away nothing from the practicality of the basic airframe.

I've borrowed this concept of partially overlapping propeller disks from my earlier work on aerial drones and in both cases it has been an attempt to make designs as compact as possible whilst still maintaining the best efficiency from each combo.

Accordingly both props run in the same direction here viz. clockwise from the rear, meaning overlapping portions of each blade operate in an opposite direction... which is what you'd want.

You can also see how the decks provide extra protection for carbon-fibre blades that are prone to damage, beside stabilising the centre-section that supports both a pair of hydroskis bedsides the eventual payload in the shape of me.

The motors are wooden blocks but will be subbed with the real thing as and when I am willing and able enough to launch this thing on water. The motors are the least powerful of T-motor's U-7 type and so I fear it'll run like a dog; though better a live dog than a dead lion, eh Gromit?

Seat-back will be lowered after the pics too, as it blankets the props more than I'd want.

The craft prior this addition weighed some 20kg or 45lb, which I know from having put the thing together can be improved upon substantially.