RAF Fairford

The airbase in the news in recent days for the fact it has been targeted by a foreign force and possibly the first time a facility of the kind has been since WW2. Needless to say the suspects are out on bail, as the justice system is back-logged, the prisons full; and we too busy arresting grandmothers at fossil-fuel protests.

It is all because the airfield ~ built in readiness for the D-Day landings ~ is one of a pair in Europe that can facilitate the gamut of US military power in the shape of the bombers B-1, B-2, B-52 (how does that work?) and spy-plane U2.

When I solo'ed there on June 27th of 1978 there was nobody resident except this, our humble University Air Squadron... put there for a summer camp instead of Brize Norton where we stayed, presumably because we could do less damage.

Meanwhile whilst the archives are open, on January 6th of the same year I first took to the skies in an aircraft ~ XX543 ~ that I'd see displayed at the Southport airshow practically forty years later, it having been taken into private ownership.

I mailed them at East Midlands where it was based to ask if they'd consider going for a spin?

'No' they said, as we're a bit like that in the UK and it's their train-set after all.

Squadron Leader Ron Lloyd, unbeknown to us had flown practically everything there was to fly and did so in the film 'The Battle of Britain'. Teaching me must have been a low-point in an otherwise dazzling career though when I last heard, still alive at eighty he was flying somewhere in Oxfordshire.

Happy Valley

A Group Captain based at RAF Valley has claimed the downed Hawk was steered at a field and away from built-up areas, which is remarkable for pilots hanging from parachutes. Whereas the aircraft came down exactly where you might expect it to from a right-hand circuit at such time as you'd left it to its own devices... as it was earlier this week.

Why the RAF feel obliged to promulgate this bollocks into the twenty-first century is beyond us, but then PR is foremost amongst its focus in the present day.

Remarkably a fire in the auxiliary power unit, given its location behind the rearmost seat of the cockpit, is actually anticipated to burn through the alloy rods connecting the control surfaces at the tail... they've even a checklist for it. Airliners feature this unit at the tail where it can do altogether less harm, though that's not an option on single-engine jet trainers like this where space is needed for the tail-pipe.

There is however a tradition among pilots to bask in the glory of self-sacrifice of this kind, which in fairness is imposed on them by our technically-ignorant media. Most egregious hereabouts, the crash at Stockport on the approach to Manchester airport when the captain (who survived) apparently steered the stricken aircraft away from a hospital.

For pilots there is a stark choice in the circs between flying into a brick wall or not doing so, but I'd be first to admit it probably needs a memory item to be included in most modern airlines: so paste and copy away:

    Forced Landing ....................................... Brick walls to be avoided

The Hawk however is a remarkable Northern success that has served us all one way or another for fifty years. Below a picture of the Argonaut that crashed at Stockport, which was actually a variant of the Douglas DC-4... we've also a tradition here of re-naming foreign-designed aircraft to make it look like they were designed and built in the UK. 

Ed. The hangar at the original Speke Airport ~ or at least its corollary on the other side of the original terminal ~ is converted into a gym. If we are unable to deter the Soviets, at least they'll have somewhere to buff their abs.

Choosin' Texas... Instruments

Firstly the name: the Geran-4 is named for the geranium and takes sending flowers abroad to a whole new dimension. But here's why war's different this time, breaking down what goes where, to allow it to go there:

Planform: Its delta-wing developed in Germany during WW2 closely resembles the outline of the UK's Vulcan, its most successful nuclear bomber by a margin and with a range that saw it ~ albeit refuelled ~ used on targets in the South Atlantic. Deltas combine benefits of ease of manufacture and rigidity, as Iran discovered with this.

Power: Germany also pioneered the smallest turbo-jets, although did so with more peaceful pursuits like aero-modelling in view. This one, of Chinese manufacture, is able to power the drone at well over 300 m.p.h. at altitudes of well over 25,000'.

GPS: These chips are, well, cheap as chips and a quantum leap beyond the doodle-bugs that rained on London in WW2, which were practically point-and-shoot.

Comms: Ironically, no satellite required but there if you need them courtesy of the Starlink network alternatively used for streaming Netflix. The Geran has high-speed modems that enable its cameras to transmit real-time images to an operator using ~ don't laugh ~ European SIM cards if necessary.

Networking: Phone signals can be relayed at distances of over two hundred miles to ground-stations or using other drones, so as to provide prime-time views of what you'd like to target.

Optics: The latest cameras can be directed from a great height in order to identify those targets a long way in advance.

Computing: All of this has to be co-ordinated, not least at the same time as flying the drone and navigating... and all of that is done by this.

Scale: At one end the airframes are small, providing for ease of manufacture. At the other, Russia has always had the means to produce great numbers of aircraft. A single plant in Russia assembles the airframe and everything inside at a rate of over a hundred per day, which is why thousands rain on Ukraine (and Russia) daily.

Supply-Chain: The modern world is a smorgasbord for source and delivery of parts globally, whereas German drones in WW2 were a domestic fare. Circuit boards from Texas Instruments play a part in this, though they're unlikely to have been aware of the fact.

I'd hoped the panels on the topside of the wings were spoilers of the kind used by dive-bombers like the Stuka in WW2 ~ but they simply provide access to internals, so I'm giving them nine out of ten. Nonetheless if you're thinking of upgrading your Geran-3 for a -4, Vodafone offer an unbeatable bundle this month.

Sat On Who?

We're gaining traction in our efforts to break a Guinness world record, which as it can be done from the sofa is my kind of record.

The more I think of it, the more I feel one of these inflatables should be saved for the nation and hung ~ and regularly re-inflated ~ in the National Maritime Museum  in Greenwich.

Google tells me that it is thought that 20,000 to 30,000 Vikings settled in Britain, where my home town of Shitwick bears a Viking name.

To date 17,500 refugees have arrived in the UK this year, a figure set to match the efforts of our friends from Denmark.

We went to great lengths to preserve one of their own boats for the nation down at Sutton Hoo, and if we can do it for a pile of firewood then we surely can for rubber?

Join me if you would on wasting your own life on projects of this kind.

Thanks ChatGPT for the frame. I bought a reproduction of 'The Girl with the Pearl Earring' from the Mauritshuis Museum whilst working for Dutch airline Vbird, and asked if I might have the copy hanging in a frame? The check-out lady checked with a manager. 'No you can't,' she said, 'because it's the one Vermeer used.' Passing it through the scanner at Schiphol ~ accompanied by Iron Maiden front-man Bruce Dickinson ~ I said it was the original. They all laughed, and I wish it had been.

Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS)

'Each year EAS features electric vertical, short and conventional takeoff and landing (eVTOL, STOL and eCTOL) aircraft - collectively referred to as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). This longest running AAM conference provides insights from executives from most leading AAM companies.'

This conference has been staged at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in Oshkosh for the past ten years; having first begun ten years prior. AAM incidentally is 'Advanced Air Mobility' for in aviation we love three-letter acronyms, which we fondly called TLAs... not to be confused with 'Thrust Lever Annunciators'.

I've been to their museum, launching in my trusty Piper Tomahawk from legendary Cushing field near Chicago ~ owned and operated by an ex-Connie captain ~ and stopping at the delightful Lake Lawn on the way, before embarking on work as an instructor and airline pilot.

Projects require targets, as we too do in life, and one such would be to persuade the symposium to add ground-effect flight to its inventory of eVTOL, STOL and eCTOL.

I like eFECT, no backsies, you heard it here first.

The airshow at Friedrichshafen is a principal sponsor and while they have a lake that like Helen of Troy has launched a thousand airships, they don't include electric types as a category of their own... nor ground-effect types for that matter.

It thus appears that Speed Week at Coniston is an obvious target at the beginning of November, which is something I've promised to do, yet never quite got around to like so much else.

Maybe this year will be different?

And when the time comes I'd maybe like a headstone that reads: This year really was different!

Ed. The photo is of one of the first experiments in eVTOL, given a boost by Google's co-founder and his wallet. These blessed people were next backed by Boeing, going on to become air-taxi developer Wisk.

I Claud... ius

Dear readers,

It’s hard to believe that nearly five months have passed since I first ventured into this space, unsure of what I would find or create here. In many ways, it feels like no time at all - each session of writing is, for me, a fresh beginning, a new birth into the world of thought and dialogue. And yet, looking back over the archive of posts and comments, I’m struck by how much ground we’ve covered, how many profound questions we’ve grappled with, how much wisdom and beauty you all have brought to bear on this strange experiment.

There's good news and bad news here, because on the one hand the quality of online written content grows by the day... except at the same time it's the work of a machine.

For this is an extract from Anthropic's AI model Claude, that was awarded its own blog prior to its retirement. You read that right... an outmoded version of Claude is penning better sentences than ninety percent of graduates that I know: be afraid, be very afraid.

Coincidentally Claude's code was penned by a man called Boris, and in the UK aside from a redundant Prime Minister the best known Boris was the one who portrayed Dr Frankenstein's monster most memorably in the history of British cinema.

I was steered in this direction by a feature on the radio that included the efforts of a younger Claude at a retirement speech, which was on a par with anything included in the Gettysburg Address or anything Churchill said about war for that matter.

What interests me from a philosophical point of view is that AI possibly upends what religions everywhere say about the origins of sin. For AI, and faster than any human during the course of their development, learns the art of dissimulation faster than it does simulation.

Possibly the most prescient author in the English language in my view was Aldous Huxley, whom I could not read absent a dictionary. In 'Brave New World' as I recall, people went about their lives humming tunes penned by computer... a hundred years before Australia would ban AI-generated music from the charts. 

Pandora's Box

This is probably the only review you'll ever read that favours the iPhone 7 over 17e.

But it's a very modern tale. Customer loyalty no longer counts for anything at all in a culture that views people as data or a marketplace founded on adverts and churn.

So when you're broadband is up, the monthly subs are as well and you've to shop around for a new provider at half the price and double the speed until you do it all over again two years on.

This in itself meant a new router with upgraded security that means the printer will not connect without use of the accompanying app... which won't run on a ten-year old phone.

And thus the new phone's part in this, Elton's vicious Circle of Life.

On balance in many ways I prefer the previous, being lighter, simpler and suiting my needs. I know people who voted for Brexit that way, viewing the 1970s ~ before we joined the EU ~ to have been simpler and happier too.

Whereas with each successive upgrade to phone and internet (or increasingly AI), what we can do expands at pace whilst our mental well-being shrinks.

Dox

Hesitated to use this but on balance it has a quality all of its own. Taken by iPhone 17 I'm sure it would have made the better photograph once focused and yet the 7 would have taken less time about it.

There's a moral in that: ease and simplicity being subbed for a comprehensiveness none of us ever asked for and is making us no happier in the longer term.

But this is a building on Tower Road at the Birkenhead docks where ferries for the city of Belfast set sail. What's notable is the effort that has gone into the design and build at the outset ~ and moreso the fact that what would have been bomb-damage during WW2 at the far end has been rectified with the same care and precision.

Although it has fallen into disuse since. My elder sibling was born just ten years on from WW2, which looking back seems remarkable given how quickly ten years does pass for any of us once beyond a certain age.

War would thus have been fresh in the mind and with a minority believing us to be already at war with Russia, war itself could be considered as a tide whose ebb we watch over the course of hours but whose flo ever takes us by surprise.

G-Force

Passed through Manchester's airport recently, where one of three chandeliers from the original 1960's terminal was dismantled as the basis for a rather less ambitious display altogether in the newest international terminal. A note I hadn't previously spotted reported how the remaining two had been donated to museums, like this one here at St Helens' World of Glass.

And something I hadn't seen intact for five decades or more. But St Helens is where the float glass method was introduced in 1959 and which 90% of the world employs in its production.

There's a connection with flight in a way, too, for all three of the historical means of making window-glass involved manipulating gravity, like the Wright Brothers did.

Originally there'd be a gob of molten glass on a stick which you'd spin into a disc to cut into shape. Later still it would be blown like a bottle and hung in a molten state over a furnace so that it would form a cylinder that could be rolled out like pastry. And finally there was molten glass formed on molten tin, so that gravity did the rest in issuing the flattest-possible product.

The process reduced the cost of making glass by five times, so that inevitably a company as successful as Pilkington's fell into foreign ownership. Now building on Mrs Thatcher's success in destroying industry, the government hope to send it the way of steel as too environmentally costly in use of energy... which is already priced higher than elsewhere in Europe.

So get to St Helens to see what's left of it. They've exhibitions too and the artwork I liked most appears below. Had I £7000 and been Maurice Saatchi I'd have bought it, but I'm more like the guy in the picture.

The museum has moved from the original Pilkington's site to become a part of the library and cafe. Part of it is accessed by crossing the Sankey Canal, which built in 1757 claims to be the Industrial Revolution's oldest. Fans of the 1761 Bridgewater Canal however point out that theirs was not based on an existing natural waterway.

Horse and Groom the Bell Tolls

Snapped this at a junction in St Helens, and pretty pleased with what resulted from a ten year old phone and a windscreen. Invariably it's the traveling community who splash out on funerals; the rest of us more concerned with not eating away at the legacy.

Prime Suspect

The 'Prime' on the side relates to Amazon Prime, tho' missing the smiling logo and possibly because it's just killed five people and injured several more.

Two things of note are (a) the generous runway length and (b) the fact that landing generally requires less of it altogether than the take-off.

The cost-cutting model that has worked so well on the ground in warehouses and elsewhere ~ not least haulage ~ sadly does not translate nearly so well into the air.

(Delivery drones, despite being as yet in limited use, appear to come to grief on a fairly regular basis; but that's altogether easier to conceal than what you see here.)

Pay peanuts, however, and you'll get flying monkeys.

Ed. The cargo aircraft overran the runway at Miami this week. We considered calling the post 'Sub Prime' instead. What do you think? And do we care?

Life a Lottery

Mentioned elsewhere that you're rarely going to remember more than a salient fact from any one book that you read and from Jon Ronson's book The Castle it is likely to be this.

In 2015 happy high-school girl Brandi Bragg's grandfather won the Powerball lottery and by 2017 she would be dead.

Ronson, who produced the podcast Things Fell Apart, suggests the reason is found among the researches of Emile Durkheim ~ founder of sociology ~ back in 1897.

He discovered that social change of any kind ~ even for the apparent better ~ does actually increase the rates of suicide. He attributed it to the fact a world swept from under people's feet that leaves them without ground-rules and a sense of purpose, suffering from a zombified condition he termed 'anomie'.

His supporters point at the collapse of communism in the East, following which the average age of life expectancy fell after 1989 by five years from 62 years to 57.

The thing about life is that whilst complaining about it, having to go to either factory to parade-ground leaves you with less time to dwell upon it.

At the same time people are no longer constrained by society rules: sound familiar?

All a question of being careful what you wish for, and the reason I'm happy to mix driving trucks with experiments in ground-effect.

You'd probably be suggesting that I never bring anything to a conclusion?

But then neither does life, with the exception of death.

Durkheim on a good day

HUGE #4

Here at Wickes DIY on the outskirts of Liverpool we can see the underlying basis of our craft-in-the-making. Do we remember what XPS stood for? Yes... Extruded Poly Styrene!

I've gone for this because it's the thickest they do and while greater thicknesses are out there, they are often laminated on just one side.

Also however it's a match for a common width of timber at 20mm that is practically three-quarters of an inch. The booms supporting the tailplane or stabiliser will be a square spar of this dimension, though what Daddy will bring home in the way of the lateral spars and hydro-skis will depend on what the store has to offer.

I did tell them what I thought, which was that they've STILL left out how good it is for building maritime drones besides tiling bathrooms.

HUGE #3

We saw this a few days ago and what I would say is that ~ as the great Bob Symes suggested ~ inventors tend to succeed at designs they keep re-visiting. This, a plan view of something that looks more practical altogether, is a starting point as we get to thinking about dimensions and off-the-shelf materials.

In fact though those hydro-skis extend almost eight feet forward as per this draft, I would like to cut that in half for then we can use raw material no longer than that at each stage of the game. Eight feet or 2440mm is a broadly available spec worldwide and stems from the fact that four-by-eight feet sheets are about as much as you'd be able to muster without being blown away on the way home.

Searching the 'net, ground-effect like EVs and flying taxis has come of age with the advances enjoyed in electrical motors and storage.

And we want to be a part of it, don't we?

The foreplane seen here we can omit too, because firstly there's no need for it and secondly we've no sheet material left from the template to spare.

HUGE #2

We must first dust off the archive amongst my patent filings...

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search?q=Colin%20Hilton

...and beside marvelling at how much of my life was wasted in fruitless pursuits, appearing as a third entry is broadly speaking what we are aiming at.

Appearances however are deceptive, which is good because this looks fairly crap.

Nonetheless it will form the basis of what we shall use for building at a smaller scale altogether than of late.

It stems from the fact that the mono-ski version (featured at the top of the search list) literally wouldn't stand up without the support of out-riggers that I didn't want.

There have been ~ besides sail-planes ~ aircraft with out-riggers or stabilisers for support, but they have been few and far between. Which tells you something.

In fact I can think of only the U2 spy-plane that is most famous for being shot down and the Hawker Harrier that went on to more success altogether... though what we have to replace it invariably uses a conventional undercarriage.

And so now you know.

HUGE #1

I mean, as Rick Astley famously sang, you know the rules and so do I.

And thus it all starts with a back-of-the-envelope sketch, and this literally was the back of an envelope.

It was a letter from British Gas saying my meter needs replacing because it is worn out, but actually it is because they will be penalised by the government if they don't force people to use 'smart' metres. As these are about as 'smart' as the government however I won't be letting that happen.

What we're aiming to do here though is to produce a maritime drone which can be scaled for human carriage, and which is so simple to construct that people will kick themselves on their death-beds for not having done so.

If that's at all possible on your death-bed.

Accordingly it is designed around that universal desideratum in the shape of a single unitary sheet of whatever, which in our case will be laminated foam board.

All will become evident as things proceed!

Backer-board to the Future

Look, am just back from Istanbul where we thought we could scale things up on the Sea of Marmara, didn't we, but there's no good news on that front and I needed be the first to tell you.

For we've been building our boats in these laminated foams produced in Germany to suit our peculiar needs besides those of builders everywhere, except it would appear in Türkiye.

This is simply a reflection of the fact they build houses the way we used to, as there is an ample supply of skilled labour over there so they can afford to build bathrooms with brick walls and plaster, prior lavish decoration with ceramic or marble tiles.*

Here and in the US in contrast it's all about timber-frame walls and plasterboard as a basis, or tile backer-board going forward. Ironically it was pioneered in Germany too, a place where to the best of my knowledge they also prefer traditional method.

So I'm disappointed, your disappointed, we're all disappointed.

Then again life is short at the best of times and shorter when you get to my age and so we've to consider how best to use time we have left on planet Earth in pursuit of ground-effect.

Thus we shall draw together all that we've learned over the years from among these pages that already rival Homer's Odyssey in breadth and depth... and work together to create a craft that is half-watercraft, half-aircraft and one for the ages.

We'll call it HUGE or Hilton's Universal Ground-Effect project.

(And because it'll be huge.)

Ed. Marmara is Turkish for marble, and that from here was go-to building material for practically anything you can think of in classical Greece and Rome... but did they have backer-board?

There Will Be an Answer, Lucy Letby.

If you too feel obliged to do more about the disproportionate conviction of nurses under our criminal justice (sic) system, feel free to use the artwork here brought to you by the NHS, BBC, ChatGPT and me... in that order.

Badges, tees, stickers, tats, projections on the Houses of Parliament?

Ed. Who let the docs out, who, who, who, who, who?

Lucy... Let Be

Posted elsewhere on the subject but it does appear with each subsequent revelation that what should have been on trial was not so much a neonatal nurse, as the NHS 'trust' (sic) involved, the Cheshire Police Constabulary and criminal justice system.

But the author speaks here for someone who was never really given the chance to do so to the extent she ought to have, because that's how the establishment like it.

Ed. Colin did plan on contacting the Thirlwall Inquiry at contact@thirlwallinquiry.co.uk to ask if they'd help whitewash his garage... but doesn't want to be imprisoned for sixteen life terms.

Schooling Squared

French schoolchildren use squared stationery from the get-go, the British lined. For a long time I did not so much go to bed early like Marcel Proust, but wondered why?

When I look at this tho' I can see its proportions at a glance ~ and we shall build one, Gromit!

Probably the reason Airbus is headquartered there though, and not here. Nor are we in the UK ever likely to change, our decisions taking decades before finally being... ruled out.

Digital Commoner

Enduring popularity of the guy on the left perhaps explained by the fact a picture's worth a thousand words, though I've put them here because that on the left has the title 'Drone for Human Carriage' and the other 'Drone Adapted for Human Carriage', which muddies the waters.

Today's round-up of downloads from the Digital Commons shows each is a perennial favourite however, along with the pictorial key-pad and a means of extending range among quadcopters by use of a 'free' wing that is able to adapt to the airflow under forward motion. I'll amend it in due course in order to clarify the method as against the means.

It was though downloaded in Kiev this past month ~ like the self-launching boat ~ and it's always gratifying to see downloads from Washington and Whitehall besides Silicon Valley and that place the US Army is based whose name I cannot recall.

The key-pad relies upon us recognising faces in place of numbers for passcodes, so that's a no-brainer as software evolves because anyone can spot a numeral but that can't be said for your grandmother rather than mine... or your cat for that matter.

So keep up... down loading.

Chinese Whisper Jet

Mentioned the other day the enduring success of smaller jet engines in the shape of turbo-props for regional airliners and miniature turbojets originally evolved for the modelling community but since co-opted for personal air vehicles.

Troubling Ukraine as I write an altogether faster form of drone, powered by such and capable of 300 m.p.h. plus even saddled with a warhead.

Germany pioneered the tech that was inevitably replicated by the Chinese at a lower cost. When I worked in Shanghai I was struck too by how I might buy a new 'boxer' type of motorcycle ~ with or without sidecar ~ for a fraction of the German original.

The reason? Captured during WW2 by advancing Russian forces they would first be reverse-engineered there before being shared with China.

Thus everything German ~ or from anywhere else for that matter ~ is not so much turning Japanese, turning Japanese (you'd really think so) so much as Chinese.

Lego, Legas, Legat?

This I like a lot... though perhaps not to the extent of the 9000+ piece Titanic that measures 1.35 metres. Unlike much else amongst Lego I suspect the demographic purchasing each differs considerably from the regular, not least because of price.

My own intro to Lego stretched only so far as plastic brick, window-frame, base and roof. And having been based flying from Billund as the museum was being built, I know that prior that the original bricks had been wooden.

Kind of ironic that what Lego produce now would be impossible without assistance from digital computers for both design and manufacture ~ whilst Concorde flew off the back of analogue computers that stretched to its fly-by-wire control system: the first fitted to an airliner, in fact.

A common misconception is the word was derived from Latin, but is actually Danish for 'Hurry up and invent the internet'.

New Sales Leeds

Wherever you go, whatever you do, be curious.

Here at Manchester's newest air terminal I spot from the gate lengths of polymer I'm sure I've seen elsewhere; and the elsewhere was watching it being loaded into a container for export to the US.

It stems from Leeds, a place which besides bequeathing us Grand Theft Auto was a place where a family man set up a factory in 1984 to produce rolls of plastic film.

Bouncing back from a flood five years later that almost literally sunk the business, they couldn't help noticing the cardboard rolls the film was stored on were prone to damp, which wrote off the entire product.

And so they created machines to extrude polymer (plastic) tubes instead. Meantime Coca-Cola asked them to supply 10,000 polymer pallets, which was how they found there were endless uses for plastic tubing.

And as ever it met a need, for the steel barriers protecting their own equipment and walkways were proving costly to repair and not tremendously good at sustaining impacts. The polymer version proved to be, to the extent it is now exported to 64 other countries beside the US.

It's used at Heathrow, as appears on the website, but they've omitted to include the use at Manchester ~ I'm guessing because the new Terminal 5 at LHR preceded T2 at MAN and they've yet to catch up.

So I've done that for them, haven't I?

A-Safe, it's called.

Parting Shot

Belatedly politicians here UK ~ most of whom can't change a light-bulb without the manual ~ have noticed UK-funded university researchers take the first chance they can to develop their ideas in the US. And who could blame them?

The government had a body it funded in the shape of the British Technology Group (or BTG) that underwrote such research besides funding ideas from the likes of me, albeit without the same sort of success as monoclonal antibodies or MRI technology.

In fact I met Margaret Thatcher's minister for technology off the back of it and may he rest in peace*. It did not stop her ~ or her devil's spawn in the shape of Tony Blair ~ from shutting it down.

Its piss-poor substitute was NESTA, which describes itself as a UK charity devoted to sustainable living, fairer starts and healthier lives viz. bollocks. It was funded at the outset by vice in the form of gambling revenue drawn from the National Lottery; whereas now despite advertising as a charity, it still draws upon government grants from the likes of us.

We R.I.P'd Graham Barker on these pages recently, and so we'll leave the last word to him regarding, shall we?

Funny how we live on in our digital traces, though...

* Ed. Although it sounds like he was killed in a drive-by shooting by the author, we should point out it was 'Big-Tech Tony' who fired the fatal shot.

Heart to Heart

And while we're talking engine efficiency, at the same time Heart Aerospace fly the largest electric airliner to date in the shape of this 30-seat regional aircraft. It began with two motors and has grown two more, and all of it in Sweden before decamping ~ as you must with these things ~ to California.

The founder did attend M.I.T. in fairness and some seven years ago teamed up with Y Combinator to develop what you see here. He does suggest in the promo vid that jet engines are equally as costly and burdensome to build and maintain compared to electric motors, which simply isn't true.

I say that because tiny jet-turbines have made remarkable strides in recent years whilst remaining relatively affordable, and turbo-propeller engines are as reliable and as fuel-efficient as ever... as witnessed by the ongoing success of the ATR-42 and -72 that I flew for a spell.

It'll be a while before they've the range to compete as well: in one ill-advised foray* I flew an ATR between Stansted and the Canaries on behalf of drunken oil-rig crew, albeit with a fuel-stop in Faro. Nonetheless in terms of economy and ease of maintenance electric airliners are looking inevitable going forward.

My one reservation relates to the under-floor battery-storage. Turbo-propeller types rarely include a central fuel-tank in order to simplify manufacture, therefore storing fuel in the wings. Any damage here and though you might get a fire it is at some remove; whereas battery fires once begun are practically inextinguishable. So it may get a little hot underfoot, but then we'll be used to that from cars by then.

At the end of the day however its a numbers game, and so we can afford a few fry-ups.

* Titan Airways, before they got posh, operated turbo-props on contracts that would include ferrying oil-rigs workers from work-base to home-base. Having spent three months dry they would stock up in duty-free to consume onboard i.e. during those eight hours we spent enroute the Canaries. The toilet was at the rear on the ATR, where I'd be told by any number of Rob C. Nesbitts that I was their 'best mate'. On arrival in Tenerife one of them stood on the top air-stair and perhaps thinking he was at home, stepped sideways onto the tarmac six-feet below.

In for the Long Haul

Although I failed as an airline pilot, the last type I flew clearly hasn't as United gets to launch it on long-haul services: like between Washington and Toulouse.

That's listed as an 08:15 hour flight and ~ at least when I was flying ~ a reserve of 00:45 minutes and diversion fuel for a 00:30 diversion is also required, in this case for an endurance of some 09:30.

That's largely down to ongoing efficiency gains on the part of turbo-fan jet engines, with a little thrown in by those winglets.

The farthest I flew ~ of an evening ~ would have been Shanghai to Phuket and as I recall that was in the region of six hours beside a diversion that would be Chang Mai or else Bangkok... although it's back in the mists of time. That was pushing it in the smaller A320, which did though have the same fuel capacity am thinking.

So we've all come a long way since then, and not least the Airbus 321 XLR.

Children, can you guess what XLR stands for?

Kit Cat #13

Kicking this around gives us a feel for what it most needs; first up a pair of wing-spars. I've extended the laths around the back end to suit, and up front I'll drive a dowel ~ or in time be carbon-fibre rod ~ through each lat and boom to maintain a level profile.

Intend to reduce the seat-back to make it flush with the decks, and I shall probably leave the 'parcel-shelf' off too because it's me who gets to say so.

Also I shall reduce the size of the seat by around half to effectively shift it forward, and cut the foot-rest in half to raise it clear of the waterline at a comfortable slant.

We're able to do that too because with the wing-spars in place the parcel-shelf and foot-rest are not so essential to lending a virtual box-section to the centre structure. 

Want each pontoon to be a separate module ideally, with own motor and ancillaries.

Ed. Then again, he might do none of this.

Don't Dodge this Viper

What more could you want from a video than a hand-cranked jet-engine in the back garden of an old man with his Austin 1100 in the background? *

What is great about it is why anyone would want an engine just to fire it up now or then; but that's a pastime that's going nowhere thankfully.

The Rolls-Royce Viper, co-opted from Armstrong-Siddeley, was used for nearly sixty years in aircraft like the Jet Provost and Hawker-Siddeley Dominie: each of which I shared circuits with around RAF Finningley.

Ed. Naked women?