PAV-ING THE WAY
Managing a development project is key to success at least as much as, if not moreso than formulating a working design. In retrospect what had happened at Llanbedr was as much a failure in communication as all else, and a failure to capitalise upon progress by omitting to apply the same diligence to the aftermath as to the preparation. The airline business itself had learned that a review of crew performance was also an essential element of success if accidents like Kegworth ~ where doubts within the cabin as to which engine had failed had not for whatever reason been passed on ~ were to be avoided.
There was also something of a gap in perception, Aled feeling that only minor mods to the tuning were required for success, whereas for me whether something worked or not was a more binary affair. In fact at the same facility the UK’s foremost eVTOL effort had crashed altogether more spectacularly, though this was not something that its billionaire sponsor would be in any hurry to admit. Nonetheless there is something about failure that triggers primeval responses in human beings, evolved as we are from a time when such failures would lead to death by predation if not starvation. The opposite at a time of hunting and gathering would be a perception of the blessedness or else luck that led to bounty, and thus it is easy to see why the bulk of humanity is as eager to ride along on successful bandwagons as it is to ostracise the apparently less successful.
In fact most casual observers would not have noticed that Vertical Aerospace had like most other developers in a brand-new field radically altered the appearance of each of their successive prototypes, and certainly this would not bother VCs: for the simple reason that they are as blind as the rest of us when it comes to backing winners. It has been pointed out that most financial analyst performs no better in the longer term on the stock market than would a chimpanzee throwing darts. Thus it was that their own venture would garner more government funding, along with private and public investment (in the form of SPACs) than any other on here shores, whilst yet to fly a single prototype with any measure of success. What people are investing in however is the fact that someone benefiting richly from sky-high energy prices (from owning one of the largest of UK suppliers) was less likely to fail than the rest of us.
It was though clear that the market for vertical electrical flight was beginning to polarise between ‘personal air vehicles’ or PAVs at the lowest end of the market, and urban ‘flying taxis’ at the uppermost. These latter products were in truth the only ones that investors could visualise a need for, stuck as they were themselves so often in traffic in and around the places where they worked, like London on New York. What they would not know, in all likelihood, was that whilst the helicopter was the only vehicle to have even approached this dream of unbridled freedom of the skies (and is used extensively as a flying taxi for the rich in Sao Paulo), when it was introduced its inventors themselves saw no clear application for it. In fact one pioneering brand of helicopter first saw a paid application in its use as a giant hair-dryer aimed at keeping cherry orchards in California frost-free.
Personal flying machines ~ essentially single-seat types ~ have thus always had a chequered history. On a broader scale, single-seat motorised vehicles like the Honda Super Cub still represent the most ubiquitous form of transport, and the sale of electrical scooters (despite the best efforts of authorities to suppress them) remain decidedly healthy. On a literally higher level, the Red Bull aircraft featured in stunts and racing are invariably single-seaters, as are nascent electrical air-racing types. And so there have always been any number of single-seat aeroplanes out there, but few single-seat helicopters have thrived in nearly the same way.
This is surprising in view of the fact the one requires the hassle of airports and runways whilst the other can be wheeled out of the garage and put directly into use. This is most likely a result of two principal factors, in so far as helicopters are a devil to maintain, and something in which you are more likely to meet your death in (as its celebrity customers like Colin McRae or Kobe Bryant might attest). Thus electrified ‘multicopters’ might alter the status quo in so far as they make it altogether easier to own and operate something similar, and at a much reduced cost. In other words they promise a sort of tipping point that we have witnessed with products like smartphones and flat-screen TVs, which look for so many years like they will never happen and then before you know it everyone has got one except maybe you.
The problem multicopter developers have, though, is an embarrassment of riches in so far as knowing quite how to distribute inexpensive motor and propellers around an air vehicle in ways that are both practical and attractive at the same time is the nub of the problem. With helicopters you effectively had no choice except the optimal, with a main rotor up top ideally adjacent its complex and expensive power-train, along with tail-rotor out back. It is something like the evolution of mammals that would supplant that of dinosaurs, in so far as a relatively limited range of very large and simple cold-blooded beasts would be replaced in time by a proliferation of smaller warm-blooded species in an inexhaustible supply of forms (a process taken further again by the yet smaller and yet more numerous insect classification).
At the same time as taking a punt then on what might most appeal to the average flyer, from our point of view we had still to meet the constraints of GoFly’s competition, that remained a focal-point for development. Whilst these eliminated a full-sized phone-box as a means of transporting an individual, there remained problems with the prototype most recently flight-tested, not least how to get in an out of it without the benefit of a step-ladder. You could always drop one of he sides of the box from the equation or else reduce its extent, although the moment you do so it loses structural integrity and has then to be made more substantial and therefore heavier. It may come to pass that a reasonable way of combining the platform we have now with a standing operator would be by use of the sort of three-sided structure known universally as a Zimmer-frame, and indeed DragonAir in Florida have long used such an arrangement with obvious success.
In the interim however the question would be whether to dismantle what we had, for better of for worse, and rebuild to another design or else stick with it. As I have hinted at, however, failure itself carries an odour that disinclines us as human beings and it is for this reason that thrown once from a saddle, many people prefer not to get back on. The great unknown to is whether you or I would want to remain standing in flight, as on an airborne cherry-picker, or sit back on say a Recaro seat. At time of writing the current prototype (which is set for the foreseeable for want of the energy to start all over again, if nothing else) is committed to the latter, and I feel that there are eminently good reasons for this.
Not least the fact that standing is a young person’s game. They like surfing, soccer, snowboarding and hanging around takeaways doing whatever they do nowadays instead of smoking. Whereas I prefer our flying machine to be a universal omnibus, who seating on both decks as it were. In fact the whole aim of the challenge in California had been the design of an aircraft for ‘Everyman’ or woman and we felt that the only prize that had been won on the day in the form of Pratt and Whitney’s Disruptor Prize was won by a prototype that far from being disruptive to the industry had been replaced shortly afterwards by its developers; plus the fact that you’d to mount it like a sexually-excited giant tortoise in a way that alienated practically every possible user except for hardened Ninjas. But then they were from Japan, I guess.
If you were going to be up there for any length of time, and as the technology improves that will be increasingly the case, then you wanted a measure of comfort. From a safety point of view too, a vertical impact such as that stemming from a heavy landing is least well met by standing upright. Tests in elevators have shown that the human frame can withstand a force of sixty times that of gravity and still survive intact if lying down, whereas impact in an upright position is a vertebrae-crusher at even modest speeds. If nothing else then you’ve learned by reading this book to lie down if ever you’re in a lift that goes into free-fall.
The principal problem from the design point of view is that requires more extensive protection from propeller blades for the lower limbs, although we have circumvented the problem in the finalised platform by re-locating them almost entirely beneath the flight-deck which will ~ in time ~ feature a protective grille. Nonetheless I made that decision ads to whether to start afresh by re-examining a number of designs that incorporated a seat int the sort of airframe that we had pioneered. In this event too the upper quad could be relocated where I had wanted it all along, in an overhead position.
The reason that these never got much beyond the model or mock-up stage, despite involving many weeks or months of consideration, was that the problem remained essentially the location of the flight-control computer. These are processors little larger than an OXO cube, and in fact are generally called as such: a cube that is, rather than an OXO. Nonetheless there is almost invariably just one of them, that has to be located in a central position. And as we have seen too, that becomes problematic whenever power is distributed over two levels separated vertically by a flight compartment.
The solution to this, I felt strongly, would be to isolate the two drones (upper and lower) so that they operated independently and yet in concert. This is eminently do-able as evidenced by the spectacular light-shows staged in China, were individual drones are manoeuvred in close proximity but with the sort of co-ordination only previously achieved by murmurations of starlings. Nonetheless it would up the costs to some extent, requiring as it did two separate controllers (although this would amount to only an extra £250, which was a drop in the ocean so far as our development budget was concerned).
Where the true cost lay, as ever, was in the re-wiring and tuning involved at Aled’s workshop facility, where frankly they had better things to do such as earning a living. At the same time, Aled himself was sceptical that this solution might work, as it strayed from industry practise and could not be guaranteed. In all fairness too he had just backed two horses at the expense of considerable time and effort, the most recent of which had fallen at the first hurdle and whose rider subsequently put it out of its misery without a by-your-leave.
As a means to address these fears I proffered a sort of half-way house arrangement in which I would wire the bottom end so as to produce nothing else but straightforward lift, whilst they programmed the top-end to do the steering. In many ways this jibed with the way a helicopter works anyway, in so far as its control is divided between ‘collective’ lift that simply drives you upwards, and ‘cyclic’ which takes you in the desired direction. There would be nor failsafe redundancy though as it applied to the prototype, although as this was set for a flight of a duration just long enough to secure some video footage, it hardly mattered. In terms of how this ‘collective’ lift might be arranged by myself by using the lower quad alone, nothing could be simpler from the point of view that any RC transmitter and receiver can be linked to electrical speed controllers in order to simply accelerate or decelerate them.
Even this however would not be sufficient to twist Aled’s arm, and whilst he remained an interested shareholder and may yet emerge from the eVTOL closet (and acknowledge that one way or another we shall all soon by flying in electrical aircraft) another phase of development had been entered for good or for ill. Accordingly I sent him a limited edition print of an Avro Vulcan and wished he and his team well. Thus it was that what you see at the head of this page appears only in Registered Design form, and likely to remain so.
If nothing else though in casting around for some place that improved on the garage in which to photograph it ~ registered designs requiring a plain background ~ I discovered Vessel Studios locally on Liverpool’s Dock Road. They have the benefit of an infinity wall, against which the prototype could be pictured, beside an unfailing variety of clients that you get to meet on the day. In fact studio time is such a rare commodity in London that any number of people travelled here to use the facility. On one such occasion, therefore, I followed a video production involving an interview with members of the cast of a forthcoming series of Doctor Who. And despite owning the most advanced form of time-travel in the Universe, they still ran late…
 |
| Have phone-box, will travel. |
