Tekever Takeover

We've seen how heavy-lift drones are doing the heavy-lifting on the front line, but in addition to that there is the reconnaissance that allows for bombs to be dropped on targets like SAM anti-aircraft equipment at a greater comparative cost.

You'd like to think that after the Spitfire and Mosquito the UK could do this itself but instead they have turned to a Portuguese firm, which itself has funded the supply of such drones to the tune of $250 million.

Did you know however that they are manufactured under licence hereabouts before they are returned to Portugal, re-assembled and signed off prior to being driven to the front line in a low-tech Ford Transit van?

By such means the UK government has pledged £1 billion in the effort to shift some 150,000 of such drones over there in the coming twelve months. If that sounds like a lot, bear in mind the Ukraine alone deploys upto 10,000 per day.

If there is one thing war gears up more than any other, it's production lines.

These aircraft are snapped together like Airfix, something Boeing hoped to cut costs with at a non-union plant using anyone who could wield a spanner. Sections were, if you watch the Netflix doc, an inch out: okay for trousers but less so for airliners.

Blue Sky Thinking

We saw recently, didn't we, how contrails help reduce the transparency of the skies, so that they will never again be as blue as they were ~ or we like to think they were ~ during our childhood? Well turns out they increase global warming considerably, that veil they produce serving to trap solar radiation and warming the atmosphere.

They've even got their own interest group at contrails.org where you can order tee-shirts and spray-cans of shaving-foam to create your own trails in the class-room.

But now Google, guardian of this blog, has underwritten a project intended to ask pilots to ascend or to descend so as to stop producing these contrails at all... or at least in one small patch of sky.

They are produced in the first place by a process called sublimation, when the hot gases emerging from jet-engines freezes so quickly that they miss out the bit in the middle we learned about at school called the liquid phase... altogether. Had they not done so, the vapour would simply evaporate rather than form reflective ice-crystals.

All depends though on the temperature of the outside air, and the only way to alter that is to climb or descend into colder or warmer air. Note to pilots, the atmospheric temperature does not continue to fall with height but eventually stays put at the levels Concorde flew at, and rises briefly beyond. Back at space, however, you must not go out without a coat on.

Nonetheless as commercial aviation is set to double in the near future, all of this is about as effective as trying to mitigate global sea-level rise with dessert-spoons and buckets.

Shanwick is a conflation of Prestwick (Scotland) and Shannon (Ireland) and sounds like it should be pronounced without a 'w' but with an 'Ahaaar' at the end of it... but isn't.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

Netflix's doc as ever a valuable insight in this case into regular oversights related to Boeing product, and specifically the 737. Introduced in 1967, or just ten years after the Trabant to put that into context, it would be possibly the most reliable airliner to be built until such time as Boeing appointed Jack Welch's proteges as CEOs... when it would become perhaps the least reliable.

Withdrawn from service after two fatal crashes within five months, it was described on its re-introduction by Michael O'Leary as the most reliable airliner ever: when a clown like that says so, you know something's amiss. As with the Air Alaska flight above, when the stargazers would be delighted once it had shed a door or two mid-flight.

Welch prided himself at GEC on sacking ten percent of 'least performing' employees on a regular basis, which made him something of a saint to financiers but a bit of a cunt to everyone else. His proteges, rather than design a new aircraft from scratch, decided to keep upgrading what they had, which is when the problems started. For example, imagine running with the Trabant but adding everything to it that we hope for in a modern car?

And the problem with the firing thing was that the bulk of those were sourced from the quality department... employees with decades of service sacked at a moment's notice and their tires slashed instead of the carriage-clock. They went better, driving one whistleblower to suicide in a hotel parking lot prior to testifying. Organisations do exaggerate evil besides excellence, though, as I've suggested here before.

So when you get on a Boeing, chances are nothing amiss is likely to happen but do bear in mind that unlike with Airbus, any number of the people who built it viewed the process as fairly shit, and the product they build not one they'd want either they or their family to use on their next holiday... as the documentary suggests.

Ed. Thatcher had her own Jack Welch in the shape of British Airways' Lord King, who was known as Baron King of Wartnaby to her and as the warthog to everyone else. For 'warthog' again, read 'bit of a cunt'.

DRA, DRA Rasputin...

President Putin today said of the UK's support for Ukraine that (a) he's very angry and (b) has a nuclear weapon. This is because the long-range strikes hitting corner-shops nearby appear to be provided almost exclusively by UK drones like the ULTRA up there or ~ if not Molloy Aeronautics ~ the HYDRA seen down there.

Thing about humans is, we were designed for tangible threats viz. world on fire, not an issue but great TV; my house on fire, an issue as I've no TV.

Therefore we go on about climate change and how concerned we all are, but aren't really until there's no water emerging from the tap.

Likewise, war with Russia is not something to exercise any of us until a Russian drone lands on a Tesco warehouse and sends our burgers up in flames.

The reason we have a representative democracy in the UK as elsewhere is, as with the death penalty, the government feels it is more enlightened than the rest of us and should 95% of the populace not want to go to war with Russia, it doesn't matter for it will all work out well in the end; or at least until those big mushroom clouds start popping up here and there.

It's a great question though ~ appeasement or war ~ isn't it? Do we let apparent bullies do their worst, or fight back... ideally by getting others to do it for us first?

Was Nietzsche right, and does war reinvigorate a culture? Or does it simply ruin plans we had for the coming weekend?

Discuss... all night in an underground shelter.

Ed. Today's blog-post was sponsored by the Russian embassy, and I'd nothing to do with it.

Vertical (Taking) Flight Society

As a paid-up member I was taken aback to read it's membership has declined by some 10% in recent years, which they attribute to:

(a)    Government travel restrictions (Ed. on the gravy-train?)

(b)    Aerospace market contraction

(c)    Declining research funding

(d)    The 'bowling alone' effect

(e)    An ageing workforce

I would add that its location in the US, formerly a benefit, will be of declining value. A look at the expo in Shenzen if nothing else (the size of fourteen football fields) will convince most of us that the real innovation in vertical flight is all taking place with drones, and practically all of that in China. DARPA's heavy-lift challenge was entirely welcome in this regard, but looked like a village fete in comparison.

The VFS has too been bank-rolled by the military-industrial complex, with members in the US and Europe with a sour-grape 'not invented here' purview of what is going on with drones. This in turn means ~ they paying the piper ~ there has to be wholly more articles on incremental improvements to conventional means of flight than on any other. Which is of great interest to the aging community referred to above, but of little or no interest to my fourteen year-old son.

Organisation of the UK chapter, from which I was ejected for suggesting we meet at bars on Harley-Davidsons and sleep with menstruating women by way of induction, is a case in point. Organised by one man in Glasgow and one in Liverpool, invariably they arrange meets in London ~ because that's a half-hour from Farnborough where most of the MIC is based.

But to a great extent it is down to the digitisation of every means of doing anything. For what makes driverless taxis worth reviewing is not the car so much as what is making it tick ~ and as that's a series of charges on a silicone chip it doesn't make for good copy. I headed up training in full-motion simulators that were literally the front end of airliners; but what I did is done nowadays by a company called LOFT which relies on VR headsets to do much the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

Do I have a remedy? Yes, but it is to relocate to Atlantic City, rebrand as a Vertical Fight Society and let the academics have it out in a cage whilst we place bets during a global livestream.

Ed. And can we have this published among correspondence in 'Vertiflite' please?

Crash Investigation Investigation

Are crashes really worth investigating, aside from the cracking TV series they make? 

I'm throwing that out there because yesterday the main arterial road between the south of this great nation and its northwest ~ not least Scotland ~ was closed all day northbound. It was also closed southbound as screens were erected, because we all love a pile-up. Note to government, robotic cars don't.

But we've already the lowest productivity in the developed world, and diverting cars and trucks through Little Snoring all day won't have helped. But the fact there was one fatality and several injuries involved in this collision involving three trucks and a car required an investigation.

At the end of the day, however, it is difficult knowing how anyone will benefit. The dead won't be coming back, the insurers will be paying out regardless and anyone sent to prison in the UK as a consequence will be out sooner than expected and will emerge a criminal if not already: especially as nobody will be hiring them afterward. 

A full twenty percent of accidents occur due to one or other driver nodding off, the bulk of these at the circadian witching hour of 03:00 a.m. The accident here took place at 04:10 a.m. and it is much harder to attribute blame to the sleepy driver than it is to the drunk or drugged-up, for like an ice-bullet it leaves no trace. 

Offset that against a knock-on effect of billions of pounds and countless cats kicked at home by people like me who've had a bad day. As Jason Arday's case proved we already treat each other as inhumanly as possible, and I foresee a day when rather than investigate scenes we'll bulldoze wreckage out of the way and treat motorists involved as road-kill.

Now turn your papers over children, and:

"Is this a world that you would want, or anyone but Colin would want? Discuss."

                                                                                                            10 marks

Ed. Colin is bitter for he applied for a job at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch and failed, principally because his executive summary on the set investigation read 'Shit happens, mate.'

Air Wear

What do tricks and golf balls have in common? Surface textures designed to help fill the void behind each in order to move more efficiently, or farther in the case of the latter. These vortex generators produced swirls in the air that help fill that gap that would otherwise create suction at the rear.

The treatment below is rather more of a quandary, but sidewinds squeeze into the gap between cab and trailer creating drag, and I'm guessing this is less of an issue if there's an 'air curtain' between the two made of high-energy swirls of the same?

All a bit of a green box-ticking exercise in view of the fact a fifth of trucks on roads are running empty, but beats doing nothing at all.