Istanbullish

Back when I 'served' you all at London's Heathrow airport it was the busiest in the world, but after I left it went into severe decline and so has since been overtaken as Europe's busiest by Istanbul (above). It might change with a third runway, although as this was first considered eighty years ago your breath should not be held. We do have the consolation IST was designed by London architects... ours being a service economy.

Actually LHR once had a third runway, the crosswind 23 that I used on windier days altogether. Without an ILS, it required a sidestep that would put the fear of God into most airline pilots ~ as it did me.

Heathrow as it looked when I was still there

Inflated Expectations

Elsewhere in these pages there's a post on the remarkable rise of mega-inflatable, which the UK government dismisses as a 'small boats' problem whereas it should be celebrated as a 'big boats' sensation. As children we too had an inflatable, although a canoe seating just two or three. Later in my time as a captain we would be tasked in a swimming pool with climbing into those inflatable slides that can be detached from the doors of airliners after a ditching.

But this stuff is on a whole different scale. The prior post pointed out that inflatables of this kind are wholly unique, and kindly supplied by Mr Alibaba and his friends for record attempts across the English Channel ~ a route that has inspired any number of historic crossings in the past from Bleriot to that Frenchman with his jet-powered platform!

Such is the pace of development ~ on a par with DARPA's heavy-lift challenge in the US ~ that my recent post described inflatables capable of seating some 130. Now therefore in just a short time we've (not me personally) been able to nearly double that number!

Were I a vlogger I would buy one to mount a challenge, along with a select group of followers... but I'm not, so I won't.

We shall however wait in anticipation of an entry in the forthcoming annual, which to my mind is a bit too 'Dorling Kindersley' for my own tastes nowadays. Back when I was a child (shut-up, Luther) it looked like a telephone directory and would include records we were more interested in, like the world's longest human penis.

Ed. The author has a good friend who arrived on an inflatable... or used to.

The Dove from Above

During a social run of an evening my attention was caught by something you'd not expect to be sat in a barn amongst straw and chickens, and arrangements had to be made to discover more. It is being restored by one aircraft engineer whose personal circs allow sufficient time ~ though not enough ~ for labours of love like this. The paintwork is brush-work in enamel, incidentally, just like a big Airfix kit.

The aircraft operated in the RAF between 1948 and 1984 as a transport for VIPs and will have borne any number of ministers besides members of the Royal family in its time... hence the stars on the trailing-edge nose-gear. Unusually too, braking was by pneumatics on the main-gear only and thus steering would be done in much the same way using the rudder-pedals.

Where it ends up once a pair of wings and Gypsy Major six-cylinder inverted engines are added is up for debate presently, but is likely to be the museum operated by the family most notable for the production of Cosworth racing engines. Meanwhile turns out that the self-same Boeing 737 that I have blogged about elsewhere in the posts was here too for five years unbeknown to me, or at least the portion between nose and leading edges.

That has gone to a glamping site in Blackpool that I hope to decamp to in order to report further and sit in that left-hand seat for one more time before I die, you with tears in your eyes like you had when they saved Private Ryan. The restorer we have met here, however, also has a Percival Pembroke that he intends to turn into a touring caravan; although he says the build quality is nowhere near that of the twin built back in the day by De Havilland.

Which is what you might expect of the people who put up the world's first jetliner.

Ed. This literally got the author out of bed today, so let's here it for people doing things to make that effort worthwhile...

The Cloud

With relentless high pressure sitting over Western Europe what little cloud there is comprises mainly cirrus, the ice-crystal clouds at high level forming what are known as mare's tails. My attention was caught however by these, which are contrails that have formed a foundation for a broader spread of cirrus, from jets headed north and chances are, across the Atlantic.

During the grounding of airlines following 9/11 it is thought that the skies were 10% clearer due to the absence of water vapour dispensed by jet engines high in the sky that forms a basis for widespread cover of this kind. And so if you were my age then the skies really were bluer when you were a child.

Digital Commoner

Monthly check reveals a new layout, which in some ways is not as clear as previous and a good deal slower and so I don't dwell as long as I might. Perhaps inevitably, it looks like a reasonable guide as to who might be gearing up for prolonged conflicts: the bulk of downloads in the US scattered among Silicon Valley and Washington DC, a number in both China and Israel and even one in Zaoprizhzhia. Besides being one of the hardest towns to spell, it's also on a frontline and somewhere apparently that is more interested in the notion of a self-launching boat than I am presently. This is unsurprising in view of the fact that theoretically it could be launched from a covert location on land to find the sea itself and go on to do whatever it was designed for: which I fear won't be childrens' birthday parties.

But the DARPA Lift 4 challenge just wound up and the sort of thing I'd have been up for sooner in life; but the whole idea of the public coming up with military solutions is relatively new in the US and non-existent in the UK, each having been borne of a patriarchal society in which you're not expected to come up with ideas unless you're on the payroll.

To qualify you had to be native to the US, which led to the bizarre conclusion that the winner of the challenge would be Canadian, but referred to by DARPA as a US entry viz. Avidrone. The aim of the challenge was to get a drone to lift four times its own weight and haul it over five miles (or it may have been minutes). To put it into context, DJI's agricultural drones used for spraying ~ which US farmers are crying out for ~ can lift just half of their own weight. Difference being, they can do so for much, much longer.

Disappointingly, although the top three entries from some eighty-odd got close, no one hit the 4:1 mark and of those that did, first and third were conventional helis. This is astonishing, not least because (a) they've always given away 20% efficiency to offsetting torque with a tail-rotor and (b) the winners specialise in dual-rotor types like the Chinook that do not suffer in the same way. I may mail them to ask why, but probably won't so you'll have to do it yourself.

What was good to see was that torque-less systems like that of the Fairey Gyrodyne appear to have been in the ascendant; although clearly not ascendant enough on the day. I've a couple of ideas up my sleeve for improving the efficiency of a single rotor that too is torque-less and that might best that magic ratio, but if I do so at all it will be via uploads to the Digital Commons. Then again there's a guy in the Lake District with a set of 23-foot gyroplane rotors for sale, which is quite the sort of thing I'd happily waste my money on.

The interest in replacing pin- and pass-codes with faces you might recognise (and others may not) appears to be gaining traction because as Victor Hugo suggested, there's no stopping an idea whose time has come. The ongoing interest in a drone that can lift an upright operator stood in a minimal phone-box eludes me however.

RV, US, UK.

Each special in their own way, North America's view of expansive living and another from the North of England with the expectation of a life lived with respect to its heritage viz. an ex-Army Foden to which a freight-wagon is appended.

Big Day Out: Beamish Museum of the North

You're almost certainly in the Northeast to visit the old seminary at Ushaw I guess, or the ancestral home of George Washington in the eponymous village it occupied. Consider if you would though a visit to a 'living museum' that has been expanded greatly since my first visit?

The idea for a living museum derived from a man in Scandinavia who realised that the buildings and artefacts of yesteryear were disappearing, along with the skills involved in their manufacture and use. He thus set about recreating villages as they once would have been, which is largely what they've done at Beamish. The idea has spread to the Black Country besides the ironworks in Shropshire, but this was likely the first on this scale.

So sit back, relax and let Colin do the talking.

First up, a steam hammer for pounding red-hot lumps of iron into the shape you'd dreamt of. The guide felt the nearest end did the pounding, but I suggested he was wrong and that those grooves were likely for rings to seal the piston, and the other end had a form of bracket that might be used to replace the hammer-head. They did let me back in later after negotiations withe the management, however:

Here they have re-created the safety-lamps used by the miners prior a twelve-hour shift. They were well paid, as you'd expect for squeezing through seams of coal just 18" deep (although 16" was permissible in Wales). In the adit mine you are able to visit, eighty-eight miners died when one of them unscrewed the bottom of his lamp in order to light a pipe. Universally unpopular afterward, it mattered less as he was dead too:

The engineering shed is worth a glimpse as it contains a number of interesting locos, like this one with a vertical boiler that they called 'the coffee-pot':

And you don't get a better view of a saddle-tank than this, nowadays. You'd only a choice to stash water in a tank behind the cab, or else in a 'tender' hauled behind. This was an innovative alternative, though harder to build and uglier too, some may say. Note the leaf-springs, in contrast the simplest possible means of suspension:

I queued for a visit to the coal-mine as hinted at above, and here ChatGPT helped in rendering an image of me as I might appear after emerging from twelve hours down the pit. Coal-miners worked six days including Saturday, got hammered in the pub afterward and went to church Sunday; to rinse and repeat until an early death. Nor would they get to wear a polo-shirt:

There were many makers of bricks in those days, and here are just a fraction:

To create the museum involved the recreation of any number of buildings, piece by piece, rather than have them demolished and forgotten for good. One example of just how well this has been done at the museum is the school seen here:

I like the names they'd not hold back from giving their products in times past, like the machine seen here at the bakery that would go on to get its own Marvel series:

Among the many vehicles restored to perfection at the museum are this one at the bicycle repair-shop. They were known as 'quadricycles' and pre-dated automobiles. to the extent Ford himself had a hand in their development. I think they'd go down a storm if electrified nowadays:

In the park, besides a band-stand and live music of the era there is this magnificent howitzer of World War One vintage. I was anxious for a moment as I couldn't spot a recoil mechanism, but if you look closely you can see the rails that the carriage will have slid backwards along. Whether this would be sprung or elasticated with bungee cords was unclear, but I was able to get over it once given an ice-cream:

Sheffield was among the last city to abandon trams back in 1960, Glasgow following two years later. The council in Sheffield is known for stupid decisions, one of which was to chop down the trees it was famous for not long after I went to the university there. I wrote them to say they were stupid, and stupidly they never replied:

I feature this exhibit here from the 1950s housing section, because I realised we'd had it in the family home for years not long after, though in a lighter shade. Called Rosebud, I'll have visions of it in a snow-globe on my death-bed:

Doing the loop of the museum are a range of public transports that include the bus seen here that would be known as a 'charabanc' and especially popular for tours of the countryside during summer-times in England. Here you can sit in it wearing a Panama hat and imagining that at some stage the vicar will be murdered:

The cost of entry is currently £35. It sounds a lot, but then it's a Disneyland for the demented besides fun for all the family.