Unalloyed Joy

Pleased with how the plywood version of the tail-gate adapter is looking, and let junior take it to school this morning for a 'show and tell'. In fact it went on, he says, to come third in handiwork: the picture on his phone showing entries on display and suitably labelled too:

    1st        Class 9A        D. Hoskyns      Base for bed-side lamp.

   2nd       Class 8C        L. Blythe          Mahogany fruit-bowl.

   3rd        Class 9B        C. Hilton          Means of deploying maritime drone.

Though I'd done a good deal of it so as not to distract him from online gaming, I could not have been prouder!

Unalloyed Misery

Talking yesterday about aluminium though, weren’t we? Well in a news feature this morning on Radio Four, a nice man who runs the UK’s one remaining smelting plant says that what has occurred in the Gulf has added 40% to the price on top of whatever stemmed from ongoing war in Europe.

Customers are urging them to increase output, except they cannot because beyond the hydro power they use, the UK has among the most expensive energy markets anywhere ~ thanks again, Margaret. Aluminium is known as the 'energy’ metal for the amount required to make it.

Steel is something else, the few remaining plants we have being outdated, foreign-owned and unable to smelt raw product as against scrap; which given a bonfire the Scout movement could probably manage. Remaining facilities will be kept open by subsidy, which usually lasts long enough for nobody to notice the eventual closure. Ideally they’ll brand support with a name like ‘Phoenix’ although ‘Albatross’ would probably be a better choice.

And then there’s food, the bulk of which we import in order that we can enjoy year-round salad with crushed avocado on sour-dough bread. As a consequence, one in five trucks here shuttles food, likely returning empty so as to use more diesel; given that it too is now exorbitant.

On a steely job yesterday ~ unloading sinks from a Chinese container ~ I was asked if I was ex-Army, being the only driver ever to assist the heavy lifting. Turned out my newly-met colleague was... tho' asked were he ready for a call up now reserves are on notice, he said he wouldn’t fight for a country he no longer believes in.

Given how successive governments have treated his like, I’m not really surprised.

Ed. And breeeeeeeeeathe. Crushed avocado on soda-bread for me too, please?

Wooden Wonder... ing

Why though wood? Told you, didn’t I, to look at how things are made and ~ if you’re a young person looking for a better means of promotion than a LinkedIn subscription ~ figure out why they’re made that way too. Take a look at this seat I shot an image of recently. That bar nearest floor-level is the means to restrain the under-seat baggage stowed there by whoever is sat behind.

I’ve probably seen three different types. One an extruded section of aluminium bent to the required outline; another cast as a single component; or that here assembled from stock lengths of tubing joined by connectors. Don’t worry too if your fellow passengers take exception at you taking pictures ~ tell them as I did that you’re a foot-fetishist.

You might be aware that the series of drones I produced and flew ~ or got someone to do so ~ generally comprised a space-frame made from such tubes and connectors, with the intervening spaces filled with foam sheet to prevent shear. And which other frames were filled out like this, children? Correct... wattle-and-daub timber-framed buildings in the Middle Ages!

Nonetheless I abandoned alloys when it came to the boats because (a) they involved a long drives to collect and (b) the war in Ukraine upped prices considerably because the bulk of it is sourced in Russia... the effect of tariffs and sanctions generally being global economic whack-a-mole.

So that’s one sign of the times, and another is that foam-and-ply aircraft appear to be the go-to method of raining destruction in both Ukraine and the Persian Gulf as of late.

And so I use wood not only because it's cheap, readily available and ecologically-friendly but also because there is a deal of satisfaction in doing so. Riva’s wooden speedboats that plied the Italian lakes were probably the pinnacle of boat-building, and likewise the Mosquito that De Havilland produced in WW2 was unique in being built almost entirely in wood (for the reason back then, as now, metal was scarcer with steel going into bombs and alloys into aircraft carrying them).

Ironically at secondary school I much preferred working in metal, which neither warped nor split. I still have the cannon I made at school under the tutelage of Mr Powell. What I did with this was scrape the phosphate of any number of matches and pack it into the barrel before inserting red-hot wire into the vent: with spectacular results. This we did in the workshop, whereas nowadays I suspect there is no woodwork, no metalwork and no teachers allowing cannons to be fired off in class.

Which is why at the possible dawn of WW3 we are ~ as in two previous ~ up shit creek.

You had to walk through the wood shop to access the metalwork, and the smell of fragrant hardwoods on the rack was divine ~ sorry about that, orang-utans.

Carrier Advice

The attraction of a wearable frame that electrification was beginning to look possible was that, from my own point of view, it didn't require a trailer. Once it was obvious that some from of airframe was going to be required, the latter means to haul ass was to become compulsory.

If you look at any of the personal air vehicles which abound in experimental form at least, all require a great deal of weight to be carried whether in connection with one such airframe, or else by the human frame itself. That human frame only relatively lately evolved in an upright form, leaving backache among its commonest ailments.

Furthermore the worst possible means of sustaining high G-force ~ like for instance during a heavy landing that includes the weight of an aircraft ~ and that's you laid up for a long time with a crushed vertebra or two. This is why strapping propellers to your outline is best left to AI and the short video format.

At least it planted the idea, and years later it's good to come back to being able to go trailer-less and ~ as so many do with bikes ~ hit the road with a rack out back. That said there can't be many sales staff asked how the vehicle enables a maritime drone launch besides the school-run?

It's taken the best part of the day to mock this up in laminated foam left over from a previous build, but it answered all of the questions in my head and is ready to be put into concrete form ...I'll pass the pattern seen below to my CAD/CAM people for a 3-D printout the carbon-fiber division can use for a bespoke product.

Ed. What he means is he'll be using that plywood left over from fixing the toilet, but doesn't need the competition knowing that.

Aircraft Carrier 2.0

Eat your heart out, Adrian Newey, you're not the only one who prefers using paper to computer screens for drafting modifications to racing cars or maritime drones!

Can't believe I cut a hole in the drone to accommodate carriage on a tail-gate, and albeit at first reluctantly I've gone to work on the adapter I said I'd never use.

Bolted in place of a spare wheel, the back-end of the boat's centre-section will slide into place with a satisfying 'action' which would make IKEA themselves proud.

And do you remember the centre-section we rejected because it was too big?

You know, the one painted Kermit-green that you said looked shite?

We may be able to use it instead of plywood left over from our work on the toilet, Gromit!

Sent to Coventry?

Rarely engage in public discourse and like Howard Hughes prefer to stay inside with pizzas slipped under the door, but have chipped in on the prospects of UAM as agin those for drones generally. UAM is, or was until AI came along, what investors were most exercised about at least until war broke out (again) in the Middle East.

Where aviation is concerned, we live in a mass market world in which you're either big or else nothing at all... whether that applies to manufacture or services. Look at what you use on a daily basis to get by, and who owns and operates it. Aviation is no different, and the reason for instance the world's richest man is in a flame-war of his own with one among Ireland's richest: who runs the third most profitable airline.

The vast majority of people will never fly in any shape or form throughout their lives or else if they do, it will be in an airliner. General aviation is dying on its feet, sport aviation thrives if only on a largely kit-built basis. If air taxis are to succeed on any scale it will be in China, for the reason that aviation has largely just opened up, the space is available for infrastructure and there are no holds barred in terms of both the planning and regulation required.

My father was a telephone engineer and bemoaned how places like Ireland could go down the digital route altogether faster because they were not ham-strung with the existing technology. Africa went a step further and skipped land-lines altogether in favour of going direct to mobile (or cell).

China has money and means to skip that bit requiring helicopters and do the same with the electrical transition, whether that applies to VTOL types or those airplanes now able to lift off and land on the sort of shorter runways that places like the UK is closing down at pace: desperate as it is for revenue from retail parks and housing.

A case in point of how the UK has turned itself deliberately, starting with Thatcher's efforts to sell off the family silver, from a manufacturing to a servant economy that services the whims of nations and wealthy individuals from elsewhere. Flying taxis fit into this nicely, catering to one more of those whims the world neither needs nor can afford.

Thus it was that talented and well-qualified architects show-cased its 'urban airport' concept in Coventry, backed by 'green' grants that look daily sillier as the prices rise at the petrol-pumps and we all turn off our gas-boilers in favour of an extra layer. The city of Coventry proved two things in WW2 viz. the effectiveness of bombs and guided missiles in destroying a place but ~ in the aftermath at Dresden ~ it's total incapacity to destroy the will of a nation in their defence.

The local council and government thus fell over themselves to provide land for the 'world's first vertiport', selecting an edge-of-town car-park and displacing its clients without I am guessing, a by-your-leave. The vertiport I suspect once the lager had been drunk and the finger-food consumed would like Thatcher's Britain remain as a monument to making the country great again, but instead reverted to a car-park.

In fact it is perfectly placed on the southern edge of the ring-road for town-centre and railway station adjoining... which is why it will be full of cars daily instead of a tent designed for electrical helicopters arriving and departing one at a time.

And here's the rub. Most people live in cities, and of those most in the suburbs and most have a car to maybe get to places like vertiports to take a flying taxi; except now there is nowhere to park, like a next-century version of the school-run.

So what does Daddy do? He says "Fuck it kids, let's drive to Disneyland and stop at a Maccies instead, eh?".

My co-correspondent is based in Holland and not Oz as I thought. Love the Dutch, the only people prepared to co-invest in the company that supplies the world from Taiwan with the chips it increasingly relies upon.

But I worked there as an Airbus captain at V-bird, a partner of an airline Dutch-bird. It went bust, as do most airlines unable to launch themselves into the mass-market stratosphere ~ but after it did, Dutch journalists wrote with some credibility that the two airlines had principally been a perfect means of laundering very large quantities of cash for (mass-market) drug cartels.

Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap appears to work for drones in particular in an uncertain world, but less so for taxis which like the defunct high-speed rail-link would mostly have been used to ferry the wealthiest football-fans between London and the north, where the better teams play.

From the get-go there's always been more of the smell of money round aircraft than of castor oil, or more lately kerosene.

But combine the mass-market with computers and you've got what the airlines call 'yield management', meaning prices for EVERYTHING fluctuate with demand; see below for cost of a helicopter shuttle to the British F1 Grand Prix some three months away and ask yourself if that'll change if electrified?

It's one small race-meet for a man, but one giant spell on a sun-bed for humankind.

Ed. The founder of Vertical Aerospace was inspired to produce eVTOLs by one such helicopter ride whilst attending an F1 race in Brazil... maybe tho' he'd just Googled 'is driving across rio de Janeiro dangerous'.

Aircraft Carrier

Want the means of mounting the cat on the rear of the car to be 'just-so', which it isn't as yet so I'm looking for a fast means of swapping the tire from the tail-gate with the craft itself. To do so I find my inner Banksy and produce a stencil; I knew that dipping all of those half-potatoes in paint and transferring them to paper at the nursery would come in useful one day.

With that done I cut out the shape of the outermost bracket that is used to mount the spare, and transfer it to the hard-point on the underside of the centre-section.

And afterward I cut out the outline of the bracket using the jig-saw. The plan is to contrive a plug-and-play system where, with the spare off the car, the craft can be plugged into the tail-gate in this way and simply secured with bungee cord.

Having done this however and setting it up on the back end of the car, the problem is the width of the skis means that they conflict with the outline of the rear bumper.

I am loathe to add anything to this fairly elegant means of toting a maritime drone, so instead of using a spacer for instance to set the craft further aft, the alternative is to mount the centre-section the other way around with its topside plugged into the spare-wheel bracket.

This does appear to accommodate the outside dimensions of the booms, but now in order that the rear lift-motors do not clash with the rear-side of the vehicle the boat has to be lowered: reducing the ground-clearance.

Nonetheless it's looking like the preferred option and it turns out the bracket can be set to coincide with the centre of said centre-section. The only problem with this is that is the preferred location of the flight-control computer. It can though be fitted to the underside instead, which is something I've done in the past with other quads.

Of course there is an argument for simply allowing the lift-motors to raise the craft into the air, with the cruise motors at the year providing for manoeuvre. This tho' is not nearly so precise, which means that demo'ing the vehicle for the purpose of PR would be altogether more complicated, requiring a larger field or expanse of water.

Nothing in prototyping is ever straightforward however, as is plain from these posts.

Toilet Humour

I wish to thank all those who got in touch to say how worried they were that the old 'crapper' had broken down. Rest assured whilst it proved stubborn at first, I reached inside my electrical tool-box and twatted the cistern with a 2lb lump-hammer.

Despite this it remained wedded to the bowl throughout, having eventually like Rose and Jack in 'Titanic' to be separated with an angle-grinder.

Ed. Children, never do this without covering the cistern with a towel and whilst wearing both gloves and safety-goggles. Did you know that ceramic is both harder and sharper than steel? The author did after slicing his thumb open.

A Public Appeal

Searching Manchester Airport in Google Maps I note my review of December 31st of last year has been left like a 'hanging chad' with nil further, and there appears to be no means of adding a rejoinder.

Accordingly ~ but don't all do it ~ could I ask one of you, whom I'll call the 'review monitor' to post the photo above along with the following text, with italics reverted to plain text?

(Should it be rejected by AI, simply replace the word 'gay' as it refers to the above artwork with the words 'straight heterosexual'.)

Then go your way, knowing you made an old man and Manchester Airports Group very happy.

And five stars please?

Notwithstanding my mixed review after traveling at the close of 2025, using T2 recently I was delighted with the experience; not only was a coffee and croissant available for £5.50 if you looked hard enough, I bought a paperback on imminent human extinction at a book store that admittedly wants to dissociate itself from its owner W.H.Smith… and who could blame them? My experience too at the hands of the security section was altogether improved, to the extent I'll bring the family and make a day of it. And joy, looking up on leaving the section and spotting elements of the 1960s chandeliers incorporated in a gay artwork which simply lifts the spirits!

Eindecker

Loving these Russian models because as warfare turns towards wholesale adoption of drones, as we're taken back to WW1 except on a tiny and unpiloted scale.

Compare this one for example with Fokker's Eindecker more than a century prior... apparently a 'spotter' familiar to the era judging by the camera out front.

Key to their success ~ albeit at killing people ~ is the fact they are self-confessedly 'cheap' and 'simple', which are words you'll never find used in defence of the UK for instance, where everything has to be 'expensive' and 'complicated' and provided by either BAE Systems or French-owned Thales on a you-scratch-my-back basis.

There are now more admirals apparently in the Royal Navy than fighting ships for them to serve on, which is only fair with Britain being an aristocracy. But when you look at its armed forces you realise the ranks are great at what they do, but rot sets in as you go progressively higher and especially arriving at government: talent and intelligence following the inverse square law.

A friend and Chelsea supporter used to say that Newcastle's problem was that they thought they were a big club, but they weren't (though that was then).

Realistically I think we should admit that the illusion applies nowadays to the UK too and in fact we do not have to look very far for a solution. Ireland is a neutral nation that is on the up, and nor is it a member of NATO. It does maintain a standing force that includes an army, navy and air force; the latter including no fighter jets.

The way combat has changed is wholly down to one thing, which is miniaturisation of processors and associated components ~ including satellites ~ enabling them to be put into motion by artificial intelligence and sensory means like Dr Frankenstein's monster.

And thus when it comes to sustaining life, small is beautiful...

...just as it is when it comes to destroying it too.

Re: Views

As much as to cheer myself up as anything I green-light the new toilet, purchasing it from Wickes and submitting my review in advance as moderation takes a week.

I therefore avoided any scatalogical references, instead referring only to an American football team... which will likely be lost on them anyway.

I got into reviewing when I bought a pair of folding doors at B & Q, and posted the following:

"Fell in love with these bi-fold doors at first sight, to the extent I've booked a Caribbean cruise for the three of us!"

The moderator passed them without further ado, it doubtless having relieved the crushing boredom of reading people's opinions of doors in general.

AI will doubtless consider the one up top, which as we all know can be played like a fiddle.

KRUP(iece of)S(hit)

Before work can recommence on the boat there's the thorny issue of the coffee-machine, which has been constructed by German firm KRUPS in Indonesia ~ and which requires a screwdriver with a head no hardware store is likely to carry in order to disassemble.

So that, in short, I've to liberate the switch that's failed with an angle-grinder. The way it appears to work is that push-button momentarily connects those golden arcs which in turn fire-up the processor. This switches the light to red (thing at centre) whilst supplying 240 volts to the heater, which thermostatically triggers the green LED to signal Houston that we're go for hydraulics.

What I'd hoped to do was hard-wire it for switching at the mains, although despite this being a five-volt circuit you and I know that however I do this it'll go BANG and disable the supply to the entire house... leaving me way behind on that to-do list, including a toilet that has pissed itself all over the bathroom floor.

Of course the designers of the 'Piccolo' could have provided a simple rocker-switch to have done much of this and which could be hard-wired, but then we wouldn't burn through the world's natural resources and pollute it nearly so effectively, would we?

KRUPS were vital to the war effort in WW2, and have clearly identified my Achilles Heel in the shape of my shitty piccolo even nowadays.

Not something that will ever have bothered George Clooney, I'm guessing?

Ed. No, and he got a shag afterwards too...

Smoking Gun?

Loathe as I am to cast ‘expert’ opinions on deaths in aircraft ~ there’s enough of those already ~ the stats on the rare occasion I’m bothered to follow them suggest that you, dear reader, like me to do so.

And what struck me about the death of the pilots at La Guardia following collision with a fire truck was what went before. For as Poirot might suggest, the crash like the shot itself may merely be a distraction.

Many years ago I was struck by the efforts of one ex-BA pilot to flag an issue that has never really gone away, but like ice from the barrel of a gun is practically impossible to discern in the aftermath. And that is that certain planes, flown often enough, were to have a debilitating effect on an almost statistically insignificant number of pilots in the long term… but countless in the short. Bear in mind in all of this that BA has long been run by shits, as Richard Branson pointed out at length in ‘Dirty Tricks’.

Accordingly I attended a presentation at Cranfield ~ the UK’s centre of aeronautical excellence that was not best pleased to have rented the space ~ by a small cohort who were fascinated by the deleterious side-effects of operating in or near turbine engines. This included a speaker who had collated illnesses on oil rigs, whose air-conditioning and electrical supplies run on static turbine engines.

The point was, as the middle-aged guy shuffling around with a stick in front of me was able to attest, that what happens in the compressor section does not stay there as it might at Vegas, but is ingested into the cabin along with the ‘bleed air’ that provides both heat or cooling besides pressurisation. He himself had been first to operate a 737 whose engines had been chemically flushed following an encounter with the long tail of the Icelandic volcano that shut down Heathrow.

For it seems that ~ and the 757 was notorious here in the UK at least, along with the 146 ~ the oil in which the bearings ran would, under pyrolysis caused by faulty or overheated bearings, vaporise and work its way in breathable form into the cabin. Unfortunately it turns out to that the multifarious additives in modern lubricants contains chemicals that in one case were used in Vietnam as nerve agents to incapacitate the Vietcong.

Bizarrely those investigating instances of such contamination reported the odour produced as being not unlike ‘sweaty socks’, which I found barely credible until taxying out at Manchester one night when confronted by the same smell as the auxiliary power unit ~ a small jet at the rear of the fuselage ~ was shut down. I pursued the flight, not least because that’s barely an excuse to cancel everyone’s holiday and a fairly sure fire method of being let go.

And that was part of the problem, for it was the problem which therefore bore no name. Nonetheless someone close to me who’d experienced something similar during operation of a wide body bound for the same airport was barely able to complete the technical log in the aftermath; whilst another of the same airlines captains was driving a tram in the city after long-term incapacitation.

At the risk of boring you I headed up Airbus training at a facility in Gatwick now owned by CAE, and was practically the only one there not to have been invalided out of flying for one medical reason or another and ~ you guessed it ~ one such due a hard-to-determine condition that meant he could no longer work ~ you guessed it again ~ within BA’s 757 fleet.

All of this was largely dismissed as bollocks by the bulk of pilots, who are spunky fellows, although as with UFOs we had all either seen one, or knew others who had.

Now, beside the fact I live in a farming community where local wisdom has it too many farmers died too young after exposure to various pesticides, or the fact we’ve all seen Erin Brokovich, there have been any number of occasions when aircraft have returned to the gate following the appearance of a mist in the cabin that has left at least some of the passengers requiring at least short-term hospital treatment beside…

… a Canadair regional jet requiring an emergency landing at La Guardia, with cabin crew reporting obnoxious and debilitating fumes at the rear of the cabin (where in fact all three engines are, if you count that APU).

And so could it be that this silent killer ~ investigation into which has long been suppressed by Big Oil and what might be called ‘Big Air’ ~ has finally shown its true colours, albeit with the collateral deaths of two pilots instead of simply the premature?

Don’t however let it ruin your holiday ~ the thinking has always been that as with any ailment, some are more genetically prone to ill-effect than others.

And we are all walking around with a credit-card's worth of plastic in ourselves.

‘That’ll do nicely, Sir’ as my own doctor puts it.

Ed. We apologise (actually we don’t) for the quality of the image, taken from TV while on a sofa.

It's a Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad World

Seven years since I investigated its feasibility, but now its reality... at least on social media. The takeaway in the first case being that it was never going to fly, and in the second that in the only way it matters nowadays, it's flying already.

The giveaway however in that latter case are the facts that (a) you don't want to be trying it out over the world's deepest canyon (b) those propellers should ideally be turning and (c) they do create 200lb's worth of downwash and last time I was there ~ unless they've cleaned it since ~ it was dusty.

Bear in mind however that to most of us, suitably sedated by the blue pill, it's real.

And what's Orwellian about it is not that any Big Brother has orchestrated the fact we no longer distinguish truth from fiction... but that we'll happily do it to ourselves.

Ed. Tho' if you think we're characters in a matrix, try telling it to a traffic cop.

Sharp Intake of Breath

Reading matter I chose whilst travelling recently included a book on the inevitable extinction of the human race ~ and not before time ~ and Adrian Newey's book on how to design a car. Or more specifically a Formula 1 car, the most researched and to my mind over-complicated type on the planet.

Rear-engined racing cars are nothing new, used by both Audi and Mercedes long before they were standardised, largely due the efforts of the likes of Lotus. They do though share a problem with turbo-propeller engines, which unlike an everyday jet is unable to draw breath directly from in-front, where the propeller is located. As for the race-car, it's the driver in the way.

When they first arranged an intake behind the driver's head it was three-sided like an inverted horse-shoe, which meant that the airflow was disrupted over the lip by interference from the driver's helmet. The solution was to separate the mouth of the intake ~ and the incoming airflow ~ altogether, as had been done with every turbo-prop engine out there since the 1950s.

Adrian however only introduced this standardised layout in the mid 1990s after... gazing out the window of an island-hopping aircraft in the Caribbean. Like me, tho' with success, he likes to fix design issues during flights and sketch the results prior to handing them to others to render.

So stay curious, look at how things are made and wonder why they are made that way and one day you too might be working for Ferrari.

At the same time, besides wearing sun-screen I would advise anyone wanting to get a job these days ~ when everyone else beside hordes of robots has identical skill-sets ~ is to see a project through to some kind of conclusion.

Few people have likely considered that a boat might fly itself from the shore to the sea prior to launch, and what was said about flight long ago still pertains: to dream up an aircraft is nothing, to build one is something but to fly one is everything.

Show people that you can do every part of that, including co-ordination of a team no matter how small, and people begin to see a way that you may produce revenue in the fullness of time by providing a competitive edge.

Which is how Adrian began, spending hours around the wind-tunnel at Southampton university and offering those skills to teams that once comprised barely a dozen folk instead of the eight hundred or more that each car requires.

For as comedian Jimmy Carr so often suggests: don't be the best, be the only.

Ed. The author's forthcoming TED talk will take place at the Cock and Bull in Cockermouth.

Look Up

I wonder how many nerds pass through security at Manchester Airport's delightful renewal of its second terminal, and are instantly transported to its 1960s heyday?

"Oh, what transports of delight..." I commented to one among its functionaries!

For here, and tastefully incorporated in a new artwork, were some among thirteen hundred lead crystal 'droplets' which formed the mise-en-scene at a place so loved by plane-spotters.

The original was installed by an emigre architect who had the royal seal of approval and died this century at the age of ninety-three.

Most we hope for nowadays is some or other piece of crap by Thomas Heatherwick.

Ed. Thomas failed to reply to one of his emails.

Take A Bow, Frank.

Stay curious. I spend a deal of time around sea-ports and what caught my eye here was the unusual profile of this pilot boat's prow. Inverted bows ~ sloping the wrong way ~ have a longer history than you'd think and this appears to be a combination of two types to produce what's called a 'wave-piercing' hull.

Such profiles drop in and out of fashion among large naval ships, but here the work (and the fabulous photo) is that of Frank Kowalski and his ship-yard in Ireland that appears to have sown up the fast and rugged boat market with innovative GRP hulls born of his own experience.

So take a bow, Frank Kowalski. The takeaway from all of which is that markets can be cornered by an innovative design stemming from the single-handed actions of a pioneer that will evolve to form a team involved in ongoing production.

Not always sure that's a good thing, as it requires me to do something about it.

Pilot boats are used to transport those with local knowledge of their own harbour to assist in the docking of altogether larger vessels.