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| Picnic at Hanging Dock |
’Twas the eve before lockdown ~ that annual event in the English calendar ~ and I decide upon an operational sortie, or form of ‘dry-run’ in advance of the inevitable CAA approval for thoroughgoing flight-tests of the radio-controlled TELEDRONE octocopter. For this I’m joined by a licensed drone-pilot and Martin Andrews’ heir-apparent, and convene upon a local farmer’s field of lawn-turf.
All of which proves the value of real-time experience with a full-scale eVTOL capable of levitating a full-scale Colin Hilton. I had intended upon a preparatory this kind of got lost among the Alan Bennett box-sets. Shortly after gracing the hallowed-turf, therefore, on opening the screen I learn that (a) it is too bright to see the screen (b) thus cannot tell when it is on and when it off. As the wifi has been left on too, being a Windows computer it spends most of its waking life trying to install downloads to the operating system. And whilst this goes on, or rather doesn’t, I get a call from an irate farmer to say I shouldn’t really have driven across his super-sized lawn without agricultural balloon-tyres.
As a consequence, I am unable to persuade Mission Planner to connect to the drone, or vice-versa, without which we cannot see how much battery power remains available to run the motors without draining them completely… which renders LiPo battery-packs useless, and which itself is much like burning €500 notes for a hobby. The drone does have an alternative means of signalling this condition, and this is to drop out of the sky like a fifty-kilo sack of potatoes.
Am conscious that the drone-pilot has a day-job to pursue, and money to earn instead of frittering away like this. And so I remove the Jimny to the nearest exit point without passing ‘GO’ and sit on the trailer consuming what Northerners call our ‘snap’ or else a corned-beef roll and a flask of tea.
Thereafter I repair to the electrical engineers homestead, as he is the only one of the team knowing anything about Windows, and how to rectify our failure to persuade the applicable ‘driver’ to recognise the aerial plugged into the USB port. This he persuades it to do in around ten seconds flat, and I make a mental note to make sure he’s on a short lease next time around.
The joy doesn’t end there, for as I am explaining the importance of cross-checking the electrical connections like the cabin doors on an airliner, I promptly connect two fully-charged battery-packs together so as to create s form of plasma discharge bubble that encapsulates my left-hand. The reason nobody was close enough to do that all-important cross-checking, too, was that nobody wanted to be anywhere near those 32” carbon-fiber propellers with around six horse-power each to play with.
This was almost enough to put me off, and while the damage to my own set of digits looked spectacular, ’Twas but a scratch as the cavalier without the leg said at the Battle of Waterloo. The said engineer suggested that I not post the pic on the blog, but like the great parliamentarian Cromwell would say of his portrait, it must be warts-and-all or else nothing.
For no lesson goes unlearned, and connecting the wrong ends of fifty volts is something, like life itself, that you only do once. I also make a mental note of using only fourteen-cell packs in future, instead of pairs of seven- which have to be joined in series so as to meet the required voltage.
It puts me off only momentarily however. I was once most of the way to Southampton at around eight-thousand feet when my (single) engine appeared to have iced up for reasons best known to itself, and I had to exit the airway and glide all the way to Luton Airport. Even next morning I was loathe to get back into the saddle, but you have to.
Anything you walked away from cannot have been that bad, they used to say, though as you get older you cannot help feeling that anything that left you alive cannot have been all that bad either.
Worst thing about the day though is the fact I miss my Kundalini yoga class just prior the second national lockdown.
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| Cartoon explosion-effect |
