Monty's On Manoeuvres

Loving the smell of unleaded in the morning I wheel the 'drone from the hangar for a road-test on the trailer.

We hear later that the Soviets had a lock on us as we stop for a sausage roll.

Like his cappuccino, Monty is shaken but not stirred.

UFOs

The publication of Leslie Kean's book 'UFOs' in the UK coincided broadly with the US military's long-awaited release last week of the report into most recent 'unidentified aerial phenomena' as they are now called, and for the first time stated that all but one of the one hundred and forty-four sightings could not be explained.

This is belated progress, because from the 'foo fighters' of WW2 onward, UFOs have been dismissed in official corridors ~ publicly at least ~ as weather phenomenon or weather balloons or anything else that came to mind over a coffee.

Leslie Kean is the author behind 'Surviving Death', which most of you will know from the extraordinary Netflix series of the same name. Which is no coincidence, for whereas governments in the West in particular lean toward the scientific method in so far as nothing is to believed until proven, the majority of people don't.

Most people believe in taboos, primitive wisdom, sixth sense, hauntings, good and evil, the likelihood of surviving death and... UFOs. And for good reason, the way you meet few atheists in either a lifeboat or an airliner in a deathly dive. And so It has long been a case of what Margaret Thatcher would have called, 'Nanny knows best.'

The book invites the participation of people who most of us would regard as credible witnesses, including commercial and military pilots. And here again, the fact has long been that such sightings among this community are commonplace, backed as often as not by radar returns. From my own experience in airlines a great number of pilots had either seen, or else knew of someone who had seen, unexplained flying objects. I myself have, but just the once.

And far from being other worldly, it was altogether mundane. So waiting for a train on a platform at Clapham Junction circa 1980 on an afternoon with a perfect blue sky, up there was simply a flashing light source, which flashed for prolonged periods from the one spot and then reappeared in another far removed, but in an instant.

I had already learned to fly by that stage, and knew how conventional flying machines looked and moved, and this was not one of them. It was however an age without even video cameras, but above all no means of collating such reports or doing anything of use with them afterward. I mean, what is a policeman in Clapham supposed to do with an unworldly light-source and a pocket-notebook anyway?

This will undoubtably be why most pilots have not routinely reported such sightings anyway. The author says this is for fear of ridicule, whereas I know that it's more often a case of wanting to go home after a night's flying without filling out yet more forms.

Here's another from a colleague once flying the mail in a turbo-prop the length of the UK at night in the eastern airspace managed by military controllers. He (or rather he and his co-pilot) see a light appear in their twelve o'clock and steady, at a time when landing lights were confined to landing. He queries the controller, who says he has an unidentified target in their twelve o'clock at ten miles.

The light disappears, and Richard (as it was) asks what happened to it? The controller replies to say that it just popped up again, but around ten miles behind their aircraft. And what is interesting about the bulk of the reports in the book is that whenever the UFOs have been engaged as either a visual or real (!) target at close range, they've had the ability either to disengage very rapidly, or else close down weapons systems.

It's hard not to believe that there are superior life forms out there whenever you turn on the TV and listen to a politician, but like the weather it is by and large wallpaper that we can't do much to alter anyway. And in fact the inhabitants of UFOs appear more benign than natural phenomena, not pulling our legs off for instance as we do with spiders.

Taken in the 1970s above Costa Rica, the photo above which also appears in the book is one of my favourites, as it's an early example of photo-bombing. It's from an aerial reconnaissance mission, and got in the way.

As it's developer doubtless said at the time, 'Fuck, we'll have to do that one again...'.

Breathe... and Centre

Am often asked why not replace the spiral square centre-stage with an arrangement with parallel prongs like an 'H' and truth is, you could; though there are any number of reasons for being happy with your lot.

First and foremost, with its arms spiralling away like a galaxy, this baby looks like it belongs to the heavens.

Secondly it means all the components to which it attaches and of which it comprises are identical, reducing both part-count and ease of assembly.

Thirdly it spreads the load-paths more evenly, to the extent I can stand on this and it barely flexes whereas I am sure that with any other geometry it would inevitably sag.

Fourthly and as pictured here, it more nearly centres the centre-of-gravity.

The latter reduces the 'polar moments of inertia' that incline road and air vehicles to spin... class-action against Porsche anyone? What it does however for multicopters with their four axes of lift is to spread payloads more evenly, which in turn means that all propellers rotate at the same RPM given all else being equal.

There is though a feature here that represents the way personal air vehicles depart from conventional drones, in that battery-packs often address ESCs and their motors individually (as seen prominently at https://www.liftaircraft.com). From our point of view it dispenses with power distribution and the messy soldering that goes with it, and reduces both power losses and the chances of short-circuits at the same time.

It does mean ancillaries like the RC receiver or FCC need a separate power supply, but that's something I'll not be losing sleep over. Ideally I would like the assembly at each corner ~ ESC, motor and prop ~ to be swapped out as easily as a racing wheel-change.

(There are several outfits round the world arranging for 'Wacky Races' for these things, and we shall be throwing the TELEDRONE hat into the ring, incidentally.)

Note too that the avionics are pitched beneath the pilot seat, as in airliners. Maybe all those hours I spent there were not wasted after all?

Rebus

This is the second fitment of the battery-packs I tried yesterday but at five I decided it looked like a dog's dinner and watched the Euro 2020 soccer tournament instead.

And on top of all of this ~ quite literally ~ Monty's seat still has to go.

I'd reclaimed the avionics suite that we used on a previous eight-motored prototype and parked it at the front, more or less as was. It was a revelation to me that the FCC or flight control computer need not be dead centre, though any place else is of course likely to be sub-optimal. This hurts, as I regard my prototype as about as optimal as people-carrying quadcopters get.

Behind that board are two 22.2v packs that will have to be bussed together in series to double the voltage, prior to connection to the power distribution board (PDB) at the back, where it looks much like a dead jellyfish.

It's what in the airline industry we would have called the Battery Bus, and ideally I had wanted it fixed centrally ~ underneath if necessary ~ so that the run to each motor was around the same length, and therefore voltage.

(Lost to us from school physics is the fact voltage drops over quite short distances, which means our electric hedge-trimmers die at the far end of the garden. This is bad enough, but for Edison it meant that Tesla would build the modern world instead.)

It's a 'back to the drawing board' moment... or in my case, to the back of the envelope.

 

Narrow ESCape

Took the opportunity now that I've upped the airframe to one metre square to re-rig the electronic speed controllers (ESCs) and in an upright position to facilitate both connecting and cooling. These babies handle substantial currents beside substantial variations in current, and are more likely to fail than the motors.

But having glued them in place, some reached the motor and some didn't.

Where'd I go wrong?

Turns out I didn't, and somewhere along the way I've accrued four with a longer set of leads and four with a shorter.

Whether they emerged from manufacture like this I couldn't say, but you take the rough with the smooth at this end of the scale.

Welcome to the Megadrone

This has to be the deal clincher ~ at least in so far as building the simplest possible quadcopter goes ~ when it comes to whether we mount the prototype's propellers at the mid-points or the corners of its perimeter frame.

And this is why when it comes to flying machines, operational experience trumps the theoretical. In the debate as to whether eVTOLs are best designed by practitioners of the art or those new to aviation, there's an argument either way: knowledge hinders imagination, but inexperience can let you down with a bump.

As Confucius said, 'Study without thought is useless, although thought without study is dangerous! And can somebody get me a green tea?'

Furthermore if you've been close to kilowatts driving propellers at several thousand RPM, you realise there has to be secure passage between you and working parts. In previous prototypes that I've tested this clearance was nearly absent, and connecting the batteries was much like feeding sharks from outside a cage instead of inside.

And in this case as it'll be my cock on the block, I tell Monty that we'll stick with the outline that we've already got.

A 50/50 Chance...

... of us surviving the next fifty years? Although you could have said that about the previous fifty, or the one before that.

The difference with climate change as against nuclear annihilation is that you see it coming, it's not an all-or-nothing crisis like 9/11 or Pearl Harbour or Hiroshima. It's just that for a while from time to time, places at latitudes of 50 degrees... hit 50 degrees.

(Latitude is not always a reliable indicator and London ~ like Harbin in China ~ should hit minus 40 in winter were it not for the ocean nearby. What is worrying about the weather around Oregon is that it is adjacent to a cold ocean current).

But it all started here in a side-street of London. Trevithick was a mining engineer, and steam-engines were developed to drain Cornish tin-mines of water. This was a circular logic, because it assisted the extraction of hydrocarbons like coal that in turn powered the high-pressure steam-engines fitted to carriages and (more practically) to trains. It also ushered in manufacture, which was previously confined to the water-wheels of Lancashire and Derbyshire.

Around a hundred years later, Benz repeated Trevithick's experiment of a horseless carriage, but used a petrol-engine instead. His wife took it for a spin and introduced a second hydrocarbon economy about the time the Wright Brothers took flight. Again, what made the extraction of oil economical was the fact engines now ran on oil.

Fast forward a further hundred years and you finally get practical embodiments of electrical power for transport, effectively enabled by computer. And again, computers running on precisely the form of energy whose widespread use they in turn promote.

And these things happen in a lifetime. Could I have known when I started working as a young man in London that half a lifetime hence, most of its inhabitants would be walking its streets like zombies transfixed by a screen in their hands and too purblind to notice Trevithick?

And thus the 1800s were powered by coal, the 1900s powered by oil, and the 2000s by electricity whose origin we get to choose.

Or not, as the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare himself suggested here on the stage. We strut our stuff and imagine we are masters of the universe, whereas the universe masters us by sprinkling coal here and oil there which we lap up like kittens.

So what the fuck am I doing here, developing a practical means of electrical carriage?