Hat, Throw, Ring?

GoAero is the challenge that succeeds GoFly, to which we pitched up in California in 2020 BC (Before Covid), and the organisers have clearly learned a lot from the prior.

Its eleven Stage One winners have all recently rendered somewhat derivative craft in pictorial form and yet shared $100,000 between them. Though I'm not bitter (Ed. He is), I do consider it may be worth throwing my hat into the Second Stage ring.

For the current focus is on rescue, for which elements the above is ideally suited:

    (a)    Retrieve a drowning victim at the beach.

    (b)    Evacuate flood victims.

    (c)    Rescue someone who has fallen through the ice on a frozen lake.

The takeaway from all of the half-dozen giant drones that I produced (along with good colleagues) before, during and after the competition is that eVTOLs are a royal pain in the ass. Beside that however the principal finding is that, absent the person on board and things are altogether cheaper, easier and safer.

Which brings you back to the Industrial Revolution and the canals and railways here in Lancashire that made it all possible. For an early finding was a horse could pull a ton on land, but two on rail and no less than forty on water.

Once you're moving fast enough however, progress in the air is wholly more effective than on water, with one proviso: it takes a good deal of energy to get airborne in the first place.

Many years ago I gave up a spin in a Whirlwind helicopter for a flying lesson that did not eventuate... story of my life. It was dedicated to SAR, or Search and Rescue, and this is something the UK can no longer really afford, along with all else. The turbine engines such aircraft use have to be exercised regularly even if there is no rescuing to be done.

The modus operandi of the sketch ~ penned as ever around 04:00 a.m. ~ is to fly to a rescue by air (where else?) and to recover by water. In this way you are reducing the cost of getting the thing up there to travel to the rescue site soonest and to conduct the search. And afterward to return with the casualty by sea, which ideally they'd now be out of.

Then it's travelling light on outbound (ideal in air) and heavy inbound (ideal on water): all of which means you can deploy several hundred for the cost of a single helicopter.

Imprinted on my memory from childhood is the lion surmounted by a swarm of bees on the tins of golden syrup I'd use to sweeten my porridge. It's been removed, as you can imagine, for fear of it unsettling the snowflake generation at breakfast.

But there's a moral to the tale: paper covers rock, bees sting lion*.

* Yes, I know it was supposed to be dead already... get a life.

Re: Freeze

I realise the outline is changing more frequently than President Trump's decisions on trade tariffs, but this is finally moving in the direction (Ed. if not forwards?).

The panels that stiffen the frame of each pontoon are upped to mid-level, as much as anything because (a) it's best placed for an advertising hoarding and (b) looks better. Each is made from a length of skirting board, as per skis, and backed by sheet foam to straighten it out whilst adding a soupçon of displacement.

I've removed the extended guard-rails that protected the props beside making it look like it would go faster, and returned to the simple cross-bar that outlines the extent of each prop for safety reasons. The arrangement makes both carrying and working on the cat altogether easier, besides reducing its weight.

The centre-board is just eight inches wide, which will be reduced eventually to six as it can then be capped by the same section of uPVC skirting, albeit doubled up... while at the same time saving on those drives to the Lake District in search of exotic plies.

Regards the vital stats, the beam is 27" across the skis (or 46" as seen here) and the length 77", whilst the gross weight to date including a minimum battery-pack installation, speed controllers, props and motors is just fifteen pounds or seven kilos.

As and when the switch to carbon-fibre is made, however, we can improve on that.

Looking at it I can feel my mojo returning, for I've been in need of extra yoga recently.

"Nice chaturangas" I was told, without thinking they were showing.

Board Out My Brain

I wheel the 'buddy board' out of the hangar again, in an ongoing effort to get T-motor's ESCs communicating with their U7s: currently (geddit?) about as easy as getting Presidents Trump and Zelensky talking.

Wheeled out of the hangar at the same time, however, is electronics guru Phil... who not only lives locally, but has also done sterling work on my drones in the recent past.

Should he not succeed in getting the rotors turning, I've a valid excuse to throw in the oily towel.

Behold My Works...

... and tremble with laughter.

As thoughts turn to senescence and death, I'm constantly amazed by the enduring appeal of headstones that practically nobody visits after a year or two or at best until such time as those most closely connected pass on themselves. More enduring as of now ~ nuclear annihilation excepted ~ is our digital selves, with their lasting appeal.

There's a lesson in this because, once dead no-one is interested in your social feeds, or what Elvis has been up to recently. Our works, however, continue to live a life all of their own.

My monthly (or is it quarterly?) stats on who has been downloading my modest papers is the perfect reading over a coffee in the morning (plus pizza with poached egg).

Why for instance has this one been downloaded a two dozen times on a remote island in Scotland. The clue is likely a school project, the dour schoolmaster pinning this one up on the digital whiteboard and saying, "Drugs do this to you."

My eye was nonetheless drawn to the pair of nearby villages producing some of the best whisky in the world, and I see myself eyeing a grant for education of the young.

On the other hand, someone has downloaded the same paper in Uzbekistan... WTF?

There are two takeaways from all of this however, and one is the enduring appeal of the two papers featuring this means of human carriage, and on the other hand means of turning a quadcopter into a wing-borne airplane using a self-tilting wing: giving it more range and endurance.

The other is the constant trickle of downloads located in California, China and India, which either suggests that this is where the world is being invented; or else merely the fact there are more people there to begin with.

With the possible exception of California, which is where the TD Commons site itself is hosted.

Why am I not there, instead of eating pizza and poached egg here in Royston Vasey?

Footnote: the building is actually Rivington Pike, not ten miles from here by drone...

Box Clever?

I'll have inevitably to defer to convention and add a 'vessel' if only because batteries and electrical equipment are decidedly averse to contact with salt water.

A benefit is ~ despite it being at risk to holes beneath the waterline ~ it does marvels for the volume of displacement and thus the payload.

And allows us to stand around with tots of rum saying "She's a fine vessel, sir, and no mistake...".

Another benefit is that the pontoons need no panels for displacement or else to form a shear web, because the box itself provides for both functions.

There'll be a lid of course and ~ should it ever be crewed ~ you've a ready-made coffin for those burials at sea.

On a more serious note, expect to see as many of these things flying around on water as there are currently in the air over Europe.

A good while ago I spoke to an ex-RAF pilot who runs a company making drones that the the RAF itself has tested as a means of launching missiles.

His opinion was that WW3 had broken out already, but that most people in the UK had not yet caught up with the fact: a phoney war like that your grandparents experienced.

Have a nice day.

Hot-Air Bus

This the final slide of note from the presentation featured prior. The vessel on the left looks, and is, rather silly ~ Airbus hoping that Flettner rotors will deflect us from the fact that carbon emissions due airliners continue to rise near-exponentially. More to the point the same report points out that almost all reductions in emissions are due advances in jet engines, whilst the most ubiquitous aircraft in the form of the Boeing 737 dates from a time now nearer to that of the Wright Brothers than our own.

Altogether more worthy of worthy of our attention is the re-discovery of surface-effect craft in the form of Regent's efforts in the US. Note in particular that it relies solely on aero-propellers instead of water-screws: something I think we need to get used to if we want drones to move faster and more efficiently over water.

Conventionally what stymied these aircraft was fairly lousy sea-keeping, which meant that they would as often as not come to grief when seas got choppier; which they've a nasty habit of doing.

Drones n' Phones

I had intended to touch on elements of today's post, but UP Partners' 2025 Moving World Report does it so much better and to a much greater extent.

I had intended to point out that the single greatest advance in warfare lies with the use of drones, which account for two-thirds of the materiel losses sustained by the Russian army in and around Ukraine.

This is a consequence of the latter's purchase of over ten-thousand commercial drones per month from China, destined to carry modest munitions that have proven sufficient however to destroy tanks, jet fighters and not least soldiers.

Paying for all of this effectively has been the West, and thus it represents a significant flow of funds from west to east which can be expected to continue... in fact the UP report makes clear that in many respects China is already a replacement superpower.

But here's a few takeaways from the slide-show that features almost a hundred-fifty, working from top to bottom and left to right:

Drone deliveries exceeded a million by 2023 and at a third the cost of going by road

Outside of Ukraine, the biggest advances in the above are at the behest of Walmart

Western kids most want to be influencer, gamer or YouTuber as per astronaut (1971)

After halving since 1980 pedestrian deaths doubled again after invention of the iPhone

China is massively increasing carbon emissions, but also doing most to electrify us

Germany's pursuit at reducing the above means they use less electricity than in 1978

The remedy in the West ~ or rather Europe ~ is to accept you're in decline and that even being the world's court jester has its attractions.

As regards our own pursuit at carbon-reduction ~ much like setting fire to yourself in public in the hope someone notices ~ ignore the media and look around instead.

In and around Liverpool docks the most pervasive presence is endless trains carrying wood pellets from one side of the UK to the other. It has been shipped in from the far side of North America, likely featuring destruction of virgin forest as it has when sourced from Europe.

I don't know how much carbon that involves, but we do know that more recently the required fuel for Drax power station came from a coal-mine just twenty miles distant: but nonetheless all of this ticks the required boxes, which Europeans most enjoy.

As for pedestrian deaths I recall from demography lectures that Honda and Yamaha's production of high-power mopeds that sixteen year-olds could ride actually produced an uptick in global deaths at that age.

Jonathan Ive recently said on radio that the impact of what he so enthusiastically designed in the shape of the iPhone has begun to tell, and whilst we all knew it was killing our brains I suspect few of us realised that it was killing the rest of our bodies on the streets.

Question for me at school:          Is the pen mightier than the sword?

Question for my son at school:    Is the iPhone mightier than the AK-47?