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.

Before You Go...

Ed. We cannot vacate Facebook without posting the sort of things here the author should have posted there, like appearing at a recent parkrun as Wonder Woman ~ there are prizes this week for those able to spot the real woman in the photo, although to me he looks like Widow Twanky.

Net Loss

I uploaded this pic as a 'Project in Progress' to the boatdesign.net site, where it has been rebuffed by the moderator: likely because boats are supposed to be on water and not tarmac where, at best, they're merely a curiosity. This has caused the sort of existential crisis that a crack-cocaine addict might feel upon learning his supplier has been incarcerated.

There has always to be a balance between projection and reality, and my beef with the database at the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) has long been that much of what is featured is practically CGI render. In fact it is wholly plausible using AI to create the appearance of a company based around an electrical VTOL machine along with staff, pictures and a registered address without any of it existing at all. One confection of this sort even made the UK press ~ which admittedly says very little ~ with no foundation in reality that I could make out given the due diligence.

I'd be the first to admit that ideas are one thing and execution the other. The first is like the production of semen, which is rarely something to boast about, the second like having raised a child to adulthood. Or as Lilienthal put it, To design a machine is nothing, to build it is something but to fly it is everything. What he had to say about crashing it we shall never know, because he died in the process.

I'd be the first to say that where scale human-carrying drones were concerned, I did indeed get to that flying stage; but that besides a drenching in the dock at Liverpool we've had nothing much since to have hit the water. So what do we do? Do we curl up in a corner and cry? Yes, but not for more than a week.

Instead we must freeze the design right here, pledging ourselves to its development going forward. For nothing is straightforward, no-one is going to do it for you and as I said to Miley Cyrus the other day, it's all about the climb.

But I have emailed Jeff at boatdesign.net to let him know that he has let me down, he has let you down and he has let the whole school down.

Ed. The author has removed himself (again) from Facebook: he's barely interested in his own life, let alone others.

Trending Touch-Me-Not

In my day Japanese Knotweed was the illegal migrant of all illegal migrants, but it has been overtaken apparently by Himalayan Balsam, a member of the touch-me-not family of plants with its own Facebook page and Instagram account. Here it is seen relaxing with friends over at a river in Keighley, North Yorkshire.