Flying Foam

F lying Foam Colin Hilton

Design no. 3 014 418

“Believe me, one day the car will fly” Henry Ford

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Copyright © Colin Hilton 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Colin Hilton. The right of Colin Hilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him, quite assertively, in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. eBook edition published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd 46 West Street Chichester West Sussex PO19 1RP www.summersdale.com ISBN 1-84024-589-1

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CONteNts Prelude In Morris Minor....................................5 England, August 2002 The Wing is Dead, Long Live the Wing ............ 9 England, May 2003 The Wrong Brothers ........................................ 29 Germany, Aug 2004 River Rhinestone Cowboy ............................... 45 Turkey, Jan 2005 It’s a Magic Car, Pet .......................................... 62 Turkey, Apr 2005 Meet the Fokkers .............................................. 79 Belgium Jun 2005 Panamarenko’s Pilgrim .................................... 93 Belgium, Aug 2005 Living it Large ................................................. 109 Turkey, Nov 2005 Orient Ex ........................................................ 121 Scotland, Feb 2006 Silence of the Laminates ................................ 138 3

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Scotland, Jul 2006 Ground Effect Zero ........................................ 158 Foam (En)core ................................................ 177 Appendix I ~ Skimming Guide .................... 180 Appendix II ~ Links ....................................... 182 Appendix III ~ Panel Plans ........................... 184

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PreLude IN MOrrIs MINOr The first question any inventor has to ask is ‘Why do it at all?’ and pondering the answer had taken me half a lifetime. A measure of angst was understandable in our post-modern world. For the Victorians it was all much simpler and progress was merely an extension of God’s creation, and inventors its instruments. But by the end of the Twentieth century invention had shrunk in terms of scale if not in expectation. Every male English heart at least was still stirred by pictures of Isambard Kingdom Brunel framed by links of chain, and yet contemporary scientific developments had so often been shrunk to the level of the gene, or a sliver of silicon. Furthermore by then it had altered what it actually meant to be human, so that by tinkering with God’s domain in Life’s formative stages, progress either promised to enhance its raw materials or undermine its origins, but rarely seemed neutral. At the same time the general perception was that human abilities were unlimited in this regard, and the consensus was that any technical dream could be fulfilled given sufficient time. It had all been Kennedy’s fault for not reneging ~ as he was supposed to ~ on that most absurd of political promises: a visit to the Moon. Fifty years earlier he would have been impeached or asked to put it on the radio. At the time of writing, for example, prospective passengers are already depositing money with Richard Branson in the firm expectation of flights in space. Meanwhile a perennial favourite among the public remains the flying car, and the confident injunction in my original preface had been ‘Let’s bring it on!’

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Nothing proved nearly so simple, and by a process of disappointed expectations and reversals, the model I had once outlined settled in the middle age of its development for the more comfortable life of a flying boat, which was less burdened altogether by expectation. While it changed me as much as I moulded it, I felt compelled to record my efforts on paper, if only to dissuade others from such follies. The founders of the first real coffee bars in the UK had published a book called Anyone Can Do It, and I supposed my own ought to be called Anyone Can Do It… But Who Really Wants To? Few books see the light of day and the same is true of inventions. Although I had produced a stream of inventions on paper at least, eventually there came a form of mid-life crisis when as a way of terminating these fruitless expectations I decided to run with my latest invention to the point of collapse if necessary. And yes, I did collapse. At the beginning at least however it all seemed merely a question of focus, and so I gathered my patent specifications into date order and found to my horror that they spanned twenty years and seventy five separate applications. They had appeared in waves of creativity, one in my twenties and another in my forties. Correlating this with the Seven Ages of Man, this in itself probably as good a representation of ‘vigour’ and ‘desperation’ as any. The second wave urgently needed an artificial breakwater to arrest it, for as Solomon said, people return to folly like a dog returns to vomit. Although I only had a cat I knew where he was coming from. Of all of these patents only a few evolved into prototypes, and the first was an unmanned boat

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PreLude IN MOrrIs MINOr designed for pulling water-skiers independently. The prototype was made from a deconstructed model of the Arun Class lifeboat (one of the best), fitted with the vestiges of an outboard motor. It got so far as a dry run in the parlour of my terraced house in Mitcham, witnessed by my enthusiastic lodgers. It was ten o’clock in the evening before we steered a flexible exhaust pipe out of the window and pulled the recoil starter. The noise however was spectacular even to the pensioner next door, and if Lucy were not practically deaf before that evening then she would have been afterwards. Fortunately Percy on the other side raced drag bikes and found this no more of a problem than say a Mozart recording raised beyond the levels of neighbourly decorum. And the boat never did make the tests I envisaged for it upon the River Wandle nearby, so beloved of Ruskin. Moving instead to Battersea, my next prototype was a single-wheeled personal transport that proved unstable until it was fitted with stabilisers. This rather defeated the object and led at least one critic to point out that the rest of the world might regard it simply as a tricycle, which technically speaking had been invented already. More successful here was the ballpen that used a glass bead for a stylus, which I built for the British Technology Group. It was primarily intended to analyse signatures and while I programmed it to recognise numbers, more intelligent types at the Signals Establishment did the same for handwriting. Ultimately we failed, though in a way the banks failed us by turning a ‘blind eye’ to credit card fraud and passing the costs on to its customers instead, in the form of commission. If nothing else, I discovered that

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it was Ballotini who invented glass beads in the renaissance when he spilt molten glass into water ~ precisely the sort of experiment I would have been sacked for myself as an apprentice. What follows is a ‘developer’s diary’, a four-year record of the convoluted progress required of anything that might come to be of any use. It went on so long as to obscure the original reason for embarking upon the scheme at all, in the way that the mountain still has to be climbed even while the summit is obscured. What most characterises human endeavour is trying regardless of finishing, a determination to find the focus of the maze in the face of each dead-end, rather than remain outside and watch. And for the British in particular, the futility of exercises like those described here is what makes the daily grind bearable. We might not succeed, but we’ll entertain ourselves trying.

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eNGLANd, AuGust 2002 ~ the WING Is deAd, LONG LIve the WING I had never in my life produced anything useful. While other student dissertations laid the foundation of worthwhile careers, my own was inspired by a suggestion in the canteen. Did I remember how we had heard in one lecture that trees grew slower on slopes? I had not found the idea riveting, but The Growth of Trees upon a Slope was born right there and the falsification of scientific results was raised to new levels. Subsequently I took a bus into the Pennines with a flatmate who fancied some fresh air, and because this was not how Shackleton recruited companions, the cracks in morale that became evident after two hours were unsurprising. It was after all the middle of January, and so we retreated to ‘base camp’ in the Fox and Hounds to reassess the situation. Acknowledging the dismal progress of our augurs into frozen earth, I suggested we estimate the remaining growth from the warmth of our snug. Today I am proud of such initiative in one so tender. After running the results on the Commodore computer (whose cassette tapes were continually stolen for edifying pursuits like punk rock) the probability suggested by my data was as likely as a dog winning the lottery. Now, years later in my pursuit of a flying car, I set off with the zeal we reserve for satisfying our own whims in place of those of university professors. As a starting point for the prototype I set off first in search of bicycle wheels, drawing comfort from the fact the Wright brothers had used such parts at every

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opportunity. By the 1990s the Chinese had cornered the market and pushbikes were cheaper than chickens. At Toys’r’Us I introduced myself to the store manager by saying that I was an airline captain building a flying car, and wondering whether he could give me a discount on two bicycles, in view of my car having four wheels. I left the store with two flat-packs and thanked the manager for his contribution to the continuing story of Flight. My inspiration for the nitty-gritty of fitting wheels came from diverse places like the car park at Hatfield Baths, where so many cars had been abandoned in various states of dismemberment. I found that they had wheels at the end of swinging arms that allowed them to move up and down for suspension, while there was also a requirement to drive them at different speeds as they travelled around bends, besides steering them as well. It was also necessary to tilt each wheel slightly off the vertical, besides pointing them slightly inwards or outwards. Had Henry Ford foreseen all of this at the outset then he might not have bothered, but that is the point of progress: machines evolve. Like all of us, the car was born as either an expensive mistake or a joke that backfired. Why cycle-wheels though? Well weight mainly, for they were ten times lighter than those of my Peugeot. And afterward when I opened the shed door the pungent smell of fresh rubber transported me to the cycle-shops of my childhood. These were festooned with spare tyres, and not of the folding type that fit Lycra bum-bags. We had neither bums nor bags, but posteriors and panniers instead. Nor was there carpet on the floor, but only a patina of dust that lay

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undisturbed until eventually joined in Holy Communion with that of the owner. His life however was spent in a khaki coat and cap, each seasoned with Three-in-One. The oil was used to anoint our SturmeyArcher gears, the type that only worked if you stopped pedalling, unlike the derailleurs that slipped perfidiously and crushed your nuts on the crossbar. I disposed of extraneous parts of the bicycles in an environmentally friendly way, literally re-cycling them at a store in Brookmans Park. I did not venture the fact here that I was building a flying car, but casually discussed ‘surface-skimming’ vehicles, which was altogether less confrontational. People were often aware of Soviet work in this arena, which proved too expensive to continue beyond the break-up of the empire, possibly due to their failure to incorporate Taiwanese bicycles. The task behind me, back at home I mulled the newspaper over toast and pate and found that the inventor of the frisbee had passed away. The toy was named after the tins of the Frisbee Baking Company, which were regularly thrown by students on campus. ‘Steady’ Ed Headrick had only invented the circular grooves, although they improved flights spectacularly. He had made it clear that he wanted his ashes included in a memorial set of frisbees, one of which I considered as a gift on my next wedding anniversary. Seeking a name for my own company to encapsulate my ambitions, the name I initially settled upon was Wonderwing, associated on the internet only with fly-fishing bait, a Nintendo character and Caribbean chicken-wing outlets, while ‘Rolls Royce’ did not produce nearly so much variety. Admittedly the name was dated, because since 1950 everything

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had the same pre-fix, the best known of which (for subliminal reasons) was probably Wonderbra. Also, it was traditional for new forms of transport to benefit from a suitable moniker, like Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’. Ford actually called his car a ‘quadricycle’, adequately demonstrating how inventors misplace common sentiment. As I started to write these memoirs the leading exponent of flying cars (Professor Moller) was using the term ‘volantor’ for his flying car, which sounded like another mistake in the making. During August Bank Holiday 2002 cousin Matt and his wife joined us for dinner, looking at the diagrams illustrating my flying car with deep suspicion. Trained as an architect, to him they smacked of naivety, and needed testing in the embers of scrutiny by exploratory trials with scale models. Although he was right, I did not know it at the time. He redesigned my sketches along the lines of a vehicle from the Star Wars trilogy, taking wheels off here and adding jet engines there, justifying this by pointing out that my own work was so cursory as to admit any modification whatsoever. I was however aghast, like a Roman witness to Germanic hordes despoiling the totems of empire. These were not just any wheels; I had placed them with the precision of a watchmaker and they bore the patina of regular mental polish. The very fabric of my craft and fervour of my beliefs were being questioned. Only then however did I recall somebody saying that it would be great if it worked, and how I had considered this an odd notion, it not working. It is this peculiar tunnel vision that allows inventions that do succeed to be nurtured through the formative stages.

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I awoke though the next day feeling I had been living in a fool’s paradise. The common people had spoken, and they preferred George Lucas, the false prophet of the flying car. The weather was as dull and I slept long, recalling how I had once read about an artist who during bouts of depression slept twenty-six hours at a stretch. The Duke of Bridgwater, who built Britain’s first canal, was known to have taken to his bed for five days at a time for similar reasons. Creative people have these polarised emotions. It seemed nevertheless that I was like a man who woke up one day to realise he had spent his life with the wrong woman; now the car whose curves I had once flattered fast became a memory, as of a grande affaire. (Sex and acts of mental conception recur constantly in art, but the closest I came to confusing the two was on a subway to Holborn one Saturday evening ~ yes, Saturday evening ~ to file papers at the Patent Office. I was intrigued by two young women across the carriage, snippets of whose conversation suggested they were bound for Kings Cross, then a magnet for street-walkers. Their demeanour suggested they were new to the game, although they were delightfully pneumatic and for a moment I considered throwing the envelope from the train and suggesting I open the batting.) At this time the UK Patent Office shared its home with the Science Reference Library. Patent specifications are essentially scientific documents, although they are more diverse and therefore more entertaining. It also makes many of them more useful, and an ironic aspect of the work of the Unexploded Bomb Squad in wartime London was that details of how to defuse most German bombs were available a

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short walk away at the Patent Office, for the Germans were much too efficient to let go of valuable revenue. The library itself occupied a secluded part of Holborn, and had three galleries with a spiral staircase built of cast-iron, like the roof. Being Victorian it reflected the earnestness of its content and inspired its patrons to great deeds. Victorian swimming baths were invariably next door to libraries in cities like Liverpool, so that the needs of body and mind could be satisfied at once. Moustachioed gentlemen might then emerge renewed in every sense before strolling Piccadilly in search say of their two-penny blowjob. The cellars beneath the Science Reference Library contained those of the foreign patents that were not across the road, along with older British specifications. Foreign filings invariably outweighed the homespun, so that the Americans and Japan for instance lodged more UK patents than we did ourselves. Within the UK Birmingham topped the list for the most prolific inventors, probably due to its engineering heritage. Overseas the Brazilians outshone us too these respects, lending credence to contemporary theories about the conditions required for emergent cultures: they are as predictable as molehills. Selecting any patent document, you could see a list of patents that the examiner compared first before granting it. They formed a daisy chain therefore and considering one in detail might lead to a dozen more, each cross-referenced with countless others. For novitiates like me, it meant that you could embark on a search for the origin of the biro, and emerge in a parallel universe knowing everything there was to know about reflective road-signs. (What made them

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so reflective were beads of glass, though when motoring began they had settled for signs smeared with crushed bottles ~ this probably caused more accidents than driving.) Eventually they used scarabs of glass to highlight salient features of cast-iron signage. I remembered these from childhood, and because they would have outlived Stonehenge, most county councils replaced them with modern types with the longevity of a real-estate placard. The government later moved the Patent Office to Cardiff ostensibly to create employment in the regions but actually to release capital for the Exchequer. It made sense in an electronic age, but then so did satellite TV, and I wondered how the school of Venetian glass-blowers might have faired had they been relocated to a development zone. Of more concern was the loss of the Science Reference Library nearby that had also to been open to the public. Granted the occasional periodical went missing, especially those that Isaac Newton wrote personally, yet the government had reserved the new library exclusively for academics and researchers: precisely the kind of people most likely to steal valuable documents, knowing their worth on the open market. In the aftermath of my flying car crash, then, I felt like Zorba the Greek. He was the fictitional anti-hero who idly speculated with a cable car system he felt would assure the fortunes of his village. Had he delayed the project until the commencement of EU grants, it probably would have done. Eventually however like my car it had collapsed, although fortunately for my own part there was a fallback. I had had a closet yearning for surface-skimming vehicles generally for

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over twenty years (though I admit the vice is rare) and therefore I had a rich cache from which to select another type. All of the great inventors had had a crack at these things, among them Alexander Graham Bell. He evidently had not realised that in time every home was more likely to boast a telephone than a surfaceskimming vehicle. Another reason for my attachment was aesthetic, for anything adapted for moving through water or air is invariably lovely. Probably the best known of these were the seaplanes designed for racing around the Isle of Wight in pursuit of the Schneider Trophy; although Christopher Cockerill must have been going some to come up with something as ugly as the hovercraft. These were so indeterminate in their appearance that an American passenger once turned to me as we sat on the ramp and asked, ‘How do they get it into the water?’ There was also the money. I felt I had suffered enough, so that the outline of my next vehicle had to be rudimentary. Whenever people designed aeroplanes, the prospect of falling from a great height tended to concentrate the mind and swell the expenses; for skimming vehicles catastrophe might entail a soaking and a bruised ego, and having been ejected from bars I was a stranger to neither. With these considerations uppermost I turned to my shelved patents and retrieved one that looked something like this:

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It was a flying boat with a ‘fabric hull evacuated from within’, a novel variation on inflatable boats. Inventions are apt to migrate continuously until stopped by an external force like the mortgage payments, and this design was eventually dethroned like a Medici prince by a simple fuselage with arched panels for wings. At the time, for modelling these wings the only material I could think of at the smallest scale was the harder type of toilet paper that my backside saw at school. I visited the local supermarket on a mission to find it, and among shelves groaning with an array of softer papers, I was gripped by the fear that it might have disappeared altogether, like discovering the death of a neglected friend. Nonetheless a few rolls of Izal still sat on the top shelf and I took all of them, as the consumer profile probably extended only to inventors and the moribund. The proportion of hard and soft papers would I imagined have served as an index of the relative vigour of different cultures, so that rougher types indicated experimental cultures like that of the Athenians while softer papers might have calibrated the decline of Rome. Since my cousin’s visit I was sensitive to any reference to models, and learned how Leonardo da Vinci’s room was habitually strewn with experiments,

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or that Rubens first sketched nudes to scale. I had always associated modelling with spotty teenagers, but now I found that even world-class sailing boats were tested at quarter size, and that Formula One cars went through wind-tunnel tests at half-scale. I was pleased with my paper wings and with their organic forms, which elegantly combined the triangle and circle in conic sections. It was no accident that they implied both the wings of a hang-glider and the sails of a boat, for like the timeless diamond-frame of the bicycle, the shape was enduring for its aesthetic appeal and its practicality. For my own purposes it approximated the ram-wings developed by Professor Lippisch after the last war, which proved so stable just above the sea in ‘ground-effect’. I celebrated with two patent applications in the space of a fortnight, like a man emptying a bottle of Scotch between successive meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous:

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This was not to say there might not be flies in my ointment. I was aware that even minor changes to the shape of wings could have alarming consequences. Simple fabric wings, like the jibs of boats sailed into wind, are prone to reverse their shape along with the direction of lift, and this was not greatly to be desired when flying at the height of a house. When arched a stiffer panel would benefit from structural integrity, although while this sounded fine on paper, I was curious to see if I had the same certainty once hardboard sheets were propelling my backside at ninety miles an hour (or preferably the backside of a nominated representative). October was exhibition season however, and these were a welcome distraction. I liked to compare different halls, and among my favourites was Olympia, mainly because a branch-line outside my flat in Clapham Junction once led directly to the entrance, like Victorian England foresaw a need to beam me here from my sofa. An equally congenial arrangement now took me from the platform in Hatfield to Kings Cross, from where I took the tube to The Barbican and the British Inventors Show. I approached it with some relish, and as there seemed no logical flow I chose to start from the farthest corner. I was confronted here by an angle-poise lamp with a baseball cap in lieu of a shade. The object, its creator explained, was to promote sports teams. I thought the idea absurd, but then I wondered how absurd most of my own ideas appeared. Next up was a man who thought cars ought to be running on liquid nitrogen. I liked the scope of his ambition and his theories, expounded here by rubber tubing and acrylic cylinders. Car engines use expanding

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gases to drive a piston, like a bicycle-pump in reverse. Nitrogen is a gas at room temperature, but liquefies if cooled sufficiently. When released into the warm cylinders of an engine, it would expand back into a gas and drive the pistons like any form of combustion ~ although there was the obvious drawback that nobody out there was selling liquid nitrogen. Further on another inventor had an air of Tony Benn about him, giving you the impression he might lash out physically were you to challenge his precepts. He told me his system of roofing would change the condition of the Third World, though when I asked how it worked, he said that it was too complicated to explain; which left me wondering how they were going to cope in Africa. Talking to him however I realised why I was here, amongst teeming sentiments of hope and righteous expectation. They were my people. What was so exciting anyway about a panelled aeroplane? For one thing, it was about as easy as wings got. Your earliest encounter with flight was probably a paper dart sailing across the classroom. The reason they fly is that material at that scale is easily folded, yet stiff enough to retain its shape. Were it to be arched, the principle might be practical at a larger scale, as the tension would retain the same rigidity. Things that move quickly through water are ideally long and narrow, because anything else would be prone to catch the wave tops and spin the vessel around in a ‘ground loop’. The Pacific peoples who invented surfing always knew this to be the case, and they fitted their slender canoes with outriggers. Conventionally aeroplanes have extended wingspans, but then I was never conventional, and so my craft looked positively Fijian:

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Another advantage of panels was that they were easily assembled by less gifted craftsmen than myself. This was going to be the original flat-pack aeroplane and it was my ambition to sell it through outlets like IKEA. Ideally it would arrive by flatbed truck in the morning and while your colleagues were commuting home that evening you would be flying on a magic carpet. Two of the screws would naturally be missing and the instructions would appear in faint photocopy and begin ‘Thank-you for purchasing a Wonderwing. In the event of assembly problems, call our unattended help-line. Made in Taiwan.’ Nothing in the design was without precedent, for I have always recycled ideas and borrowed features extensively for whatever I envisaged at the time. In the wider world, most attempts at flight over water used conventional aeroplane wings, adapted to these circumstances. (The odd exception included a ramwing produced in the 1970s by Californian students and wittily named ‘R ameses’. It was an uncompromising attempt to trap air beneath a wedge­

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shaped wing that looked like a giant cheese. Built of hardboard and supported by scaffolding, it both flew and achieved no success whatsoever.) Looking at the illustration of my craft above, I considered it looked altogether more practical. With panel wings and a similar tail-plane, its sides were parallel so as to penetrate the waves, while the design was two-dimensional and required only flexing into shape. While the appearance of their aeroplane had not bothered the Wright Brothers, having been born into the age of fifteen-minutes of fame I was more concerned with appearances, both of the flying boat and of myself in the inevitable video footage; not for me the tedium of wind tunnel tests. The Wright Brothers were involved with introducing the notion of flight and like them, rather than be consumed with the perfect prototype I wanted to suggest commercial possibilities. Ford must have known that the world would not forever be satisfied with the ‘Model-T’. It was about geno- and not pheno-types. Operationally skimming flight had much to commend it. Conventional flying I knew was fraught with problems and provided its rewards for only a fraction of the time. If life was to be unrewarding then it ought to be cheap, yet the engines alone cost as much as a family car. Airspace and roads were both over­ regulated, whereas seven-tenths of the Earth was covered by water, and assuming only some of it was calm for some of the time, that still left plenty of room for skimming. Flying sucked in contrast to this progress over turquoise seas or petrified waves of desert. And my designs looked like they belonged in this environment.

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Which led me to think about the type of materials that I would use for my wings. Would I go for marine ply, redolent of days on the Broads, and ice-cubes clinking in gin to the accompaniment of Noel Coward ditties? Or should I go for the techno look? I searched the internet for sheet-metal retailers and found one in Northampton supplying aviation-grade aluminium. I doubted whether I needed aviation-grade aluminium, but I did see an Open University programme (when there was nothing else on) that showed how strong aluminium was when you included copper; though what was more exciting was that I could tell the lecturer was wandering around the aerospace factory in Hatfield. I called anyway and spoke to someone called Paul Smith, like the fashion designer, which I liked because then I could advertise Wings by Paul Smith. The sheets of aluminium were American aviation stock and were supplied in dimensions of twelve by four and armed with the knowledge I could figure out how to arrange them in my Fijian flying boat. I used four for each wing and one for the tail, getting so far as to model the arrangement at 1/24 th scale with cardboard from A4 file-dividers, kebab-skewers and a rubber band. In calculating the required lift, with no grasp of maths I tried to envisage my arse strapped to two hundred square feet of aluminium in a force-none gale. Anyway, the models floated nicely across the parquet floor, which the cat negotiated with greater caution afterward. I had decided that flight-testing should be land-based, and as the aircraft might have to spend at least some of its time in the garage, I decided its dimensions ought to match. Eight-foot sheets were widely available, unlike the twelve-foot sheets in

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aviation grades, and they produced a craft that comfortably fitted my garage space. From that point forward I based everything I developed on ‘four by eight’. I also referred to the material exclusively as ‘panels’, although strictly speaking the stock units are supplied in ‘sheets’ and technically once you cut them to smaller sizes they were referred to thenceforth as ‘panels’. I refer to them as panels throughout. Live with it. The use of aluminium of any kind however took me back to my triumphs in metalwork class at school, complemented by my contemporary fondness for heavy metal bands. During this phase of youth I hung in the park sporting long hair, an army-surplus greatcoat and menthol cigarettes, hoping it would attract passing females. In retrospect I had more chance of attracting anthropologists. Our anthem was Hawkwind’s Silver Machine (which we heard live at The Stadium in Liverpool) and the prospect of singing this astride my prototype thrilled me even thirty years later. Another thing to relish was meeting the ‘pop­ riveter’ again. This is not a DJ, but a simple way of joining sheet metal that I used extensively on my Austin Mini, which like every other car at the time was mostly rust. I rebuilt its body panels with popriveted patches the way surgeons fit sutures. Afterwards they were liberally coated with resin filler, sprayed with primer and presented for the MOT test. (If the same method was used to conceal holes in the chassis, an additional coat of mud was blended with the underside. Craftsmanship of this kind is sadly on the wane.) Despite the temptation to devolve the task to expert modellers, I would build up my design stage-by-stage

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by my own efforts, for the devil really was in the detail and much learning was to be gained. If you give the task to somebody else you might get a working prototype, but lose the know-how. In high-tech industries this is often fatal if the people doing the dirty work walk away and leave you with stock-in-hand. It happened to the aircraft manufacturer Handley Page, whose design team produced the Herald and did the same for Fokker much more successfully with the Friendship ~ for having had the practise they could fix whatever they disliked first time around. I also needed to figure out how to create more consistent airflow than by pushing things around a parquet floor. The first alternatives were vetoed at the planning stages, and I shall trouble you no further with the wind tunnel in the loft, with its vacuum cleaner at either end. Using plywood to form the staircase into a ski-slope down which my models could accelerate was altogether more attractive, and I felt that it would be recognised by fellow aerodynamicists as an elegant solution, though it lacked continuity. It might have been the world’s first eco-friendly wind tunnel ~ or not so much a tunnel as a freeway. It never came to pass however, and in the absence of sloping lakes my models were going to need propellers. Perhaps to defer the task I packed some sandwiches and headed for the British Airsports Exhibition in Telford, which like all new towns used the word ‘international’ at every turn. This is one way of transforming places like Luton into global destinations. I parked illegally at the Holiday Inn, saving myself three pounds. I had worked once with a software salesman who always parked at Heathrow hotels by checking

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the hospitality sign, so that if it said ‘The Holiday Inn welcomes the Diabetic Foundation’, he simply asked the gateman where the diabetics should park; on another occasion he might be involved in unravelling the human genome. Here in Telford however my picnic was interrupted by a security guard asking for my room number, and I pointed out firstly that my employer (whom I had already left) did much business with his, which was now in severe jeopardy, and that he had entirely spoiled the taste of my pork pie. There were fewer exhibitors than usual and space to spare, in marked contrast to the London Boat Show. As a barometer of future trends, however, such data is often of dubious value. Huge numbers attended air shows in the 1930s, without ever dreaming of owning an aeroplane, while I myself often visited boat shows having only used a canoe as a fourteen year old. The state of air sports was encouraging, at least at this level. The whole sport was derived from the first people in America who dared strap an engine to their hanggliders. These were not of course bespoke units, but then even the largest aero engines often derived from units used elsewhere, so that jet engines often double up in use by shipping, helicopters or industrial generators; otherwise too few units would be sold to warrant development. Although the most successful engines here at the show were destined for pumping water in India, for me provenance was important. Before the last war BMW or Rolls Royce aero-engines had come from sports cars or vice-versa, in a feverish frenzy of power and prestige. Clive Sinclair overlooked this entirely when he used a washing-machine motor in his ‘C5’,

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for the notion that your car had an advanced spin-cycle was going to impress nobody. What annoyed me though about the units on display was that often aeroengines manufacturers did not include ‘ancillary’ parts like exhausts or carburettors, which was like walking into a car showroom to be told you had to fit your own windows. In fact those who were selling proper ancillaries like radios or helmets were doing even better at the exhibition, for there was always more money to be made in selling the dream than the reality (as any sex-shop proprietor would tell you). It was looking however like I would not fly my prototype on the 99th anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight after all. Why? Probably because as John Lennon said, life was ‘what happens while you are planning something else.’ I always found it ironic that a man destined for a random bullet spoke these words. I think as well that whenever we use devices like the phone or a PC, we forget their essence includes all of the ambitions, despondency or elation of those inventors who brought them to life. These panelled wings and their bastard offspring had affected my work, compromised my marriage and forced adjustments on my social life. For the individual inventor, the rewards are rarely worth the sacrifice, but because they do not realise this soon enough, humankind itself benefits. Technically, we are standing on the egos of giants. And what of the environmental effects of my inventions? Had anybody considered the impact of so many flying machines skimming the water? How would it affect sea birds, or fledglings in the desert sands? I knew how oceans had become unbearably

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noisy for whales and dolphins, whose songs were drowned out by sonar and shipping. They were especially vulnerable to impact from high-speed ferries, which provide little advance warning. In the end I drew comfort from knowing that marine life was concentrated on coastal fringes, while what I envisaged was of more use in open sea, using their speed and endurance to advantage. Besides this they saved on fuel and reduced emissions: the balsa skimmers that Lippisch designed required only 15 hp, while speedboats required ten times as much. Besides, I had flown thousands of times at 35,000ft over seas burnished by sunsets, not helping but notice that the sea was a decidedly underused resource, at least in terms of travel. There was never much going on down there.

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eNGLANd, MAY 2003 ~ the WrONG BrOthers Much water had now passed under the bridge, if not under my skimmer. During January of 2003 I fell out with my employer, and left them in February to spend six weeks publishing a retrospective, Final Call, timed to coincide with the centenary of flight. Living without money required inventiveness itself, and I negotiated another contract to work as an airline captain that summer in Manchester. A factor in choosing where to work at the time was easy access to a beach for test flights. If you include information like this in your CV, incidentally, things can go either way. All that happened in inventive terms was a preoccupation with where to put the wheels, and eventually this led me to question whether I should develop the panel plane, after all, or pursue the purer ethics of flying cars. My airline training took me to the hot springs of Iceland, to the Bay of Naples and not least the National Museum of Film and Television in Leeds. The IMAX theatre here featured a film called Extreme about surfers who used jet-skis to catch the biggest waves. The results were spectacular, and the commentary said that champion surfers approached the waves with a spiritual reverence. IMAX technology was spectacular in itself. The concept stemmed from the frustration of documentary makers in Canada, who were looking for a larger format for their films. IMAX film runs sideways through the projector, itself only possible because an Australian inventor pioneered a loose-looping technique that stored the film before it was pulled at high speed through the shutter. The team

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ran just as quickly to a trademark agent, with one pithy set of initials after another. It took an evening in a restaurant and a supply of serviettes to come up with the name IMAX, which they felt implied technical superiority. I was staying with my parents for a while now and I returned to the town where I went to school. The headmaster was long dead, a man who had had pause to say so often ‘I’m surprised at you Hilton’, and not in a good way. The bookstore in the town had been replaced with a magazine rack and coffee bar, feeding appetites instead of minds. It was strange to be back at home again and with my detritus spread around it, the bedroom looked like it belonged to a born-again teenager. My parents’ routines were fixed as tides, disrupted only by me passing through, as if in a powerboat. I watched more TV than usual, learning from one documentary how after developing TV at General Electric, Schoenberg had addressed his colleagues with the words, ‘Gentlemen, you have just invented the greatest time-waster in the world.’ I probably read more newspapers too, where I discovered that Steve Donaldson had passed away. Like me he had been a Geography graduate and pioneer of alternative forms of transport. In his case it was recumbent cycles and the obituary described how he met his wife because she had one as well. I felt that he elevated my own chances of appearing in the obituary pages of the Daily Telegraph: STEVE DONALDSON, who has died aged 38, was a noted proponent of recumbent cycling, in which the rider lies back on a low machine rather than sitting upright. He often expressed the wish that the motto of the British Human Power

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Club ought to be ‘Lie down and be counted’. He died in a road accident recently while riding his recumbent. The results of the UK patent search on my panel plane arrived during this time. These were of dubious value, as thanks to my inexpert claims the examiner had interpreted my wings as neither entirely solid nor flexible, properties that matched every aeroplane ever to be built. I supposed I needed a more precise definition of flexibility, which for my own purposes was of the variety that rebounded when tension was released, so that the panels could subsequently be stored flat. This was a problem of definition, as most materials are flexible to a point. It was important though, for IKEA had proven the world really was flat. The best part of summer was divided between publishing Final Call and visiting places like New Brighton to check out the beach. At an Art Deco exhibition at the V & A I saw how the sensibilities of the era stretched to the appearance of outboard motors too, while at the Naval Boat Museum I found that German U-boats had a range of 12,000 nautical miles, along with the lesser-known fact that crews occasionally used condoms as weather balloons. (That surely had to be filed under ‘naval losses’.) Coniston was a place of pilgrimage in view of Donald Campbell, and I crossed its lake in a steam launch with a V-twin engine, developed for steam engines long before cars. By the end of the summer of 2003 though I had abandoned the panel plane for something more substantial after all, a flying car of the sort pictured on the frontispiece, which I had always imagined would be constructed of a pair of buoyant fenders down each

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side, containing both its wheels and a central chassis that included wings. I first concentrated on the floating fenders, and at the outset ordered a set of French curves (which sound like an entrée in a Paris brothel) from Wilmslow. They were hard to find, which the stationer blamed on computers. Opposite in a builders’ yard I learned that polystyrene panels were available in dimensions of 2440 x 1220 mm, up to 70 mm thick and having densities of: Standard High Extra High

15 kg/cu metre 19 kg/cu metre 24 kg/cu metre

Stuart at the factory I called later had been ‘talking polystyrene’ for thirty years, and described himself as ‘older and steadier’ than some of the younger assistants, which probably meant that he would spend longer talking to me before hanging up than they. Standard insulation included recycled shavings and I was recommended to use ‘virgin bead’ instead. He also suggested that a fire retardant was available, although I suggested this was probably unnecessary on the sea. Back home in Alderley Edge I wondered if French curves could be downloaded from the net, although I feared (or hoped) that the search might elicit something saucier. A friend of mine had once looked up ‘Kinder Scout’, a Lake District peak favoured by ramblers, and discovered a whole world that Baden Powell was entirely unaware of. Or at least we liked to think so. For my own part I never realised there was so much to French curves, and there was a whole range of ‘ship curves’ alone. It was true that French curves

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were replaced by computer-aided design, but I also learned that: While an undergraduate at MIT, Feynman used a French curve to illustrate the fallacy of learning without understanding. When he pointed out to his colleagues in a mechanical drawing class the ‘amazing’ fact that the tangent at each point on the curve was horizontal, none of his classmates realised that this was trivially true, since the derivative (tangent) at an extremum (lowest or highest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal), as they had already learned in calculus class. You can imagine how surprised I was myself. Using my curves though I could calculate the surface area of each float, the volume of polystyrene and the waterline. I soon tired of doing this and instead I watched a TV programme on Speed Machines. An earlier episode of this featured races between the legendary powerboats of Great Britain and America on the Hudson River in the 1930s. These apparently elicited the largest live audience ever for a sporting event, as a million and a half lined the riverbanks. By this time I had settled upon the name Cushioncraft for the company, as what I was designing were neither strictly air-craft nor water-craft but something in between. On one evening then around six o’clock I noticed that the domain name cushioncraft.co.uk had become available. The only alternative to this was cushioncraft.com, but it belonged to a garden furniture retailer. How could they stand in the way of scientific progress like that? I had been waiting to register the UK version, although the process of registering a name through Nominet was a

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little laboured in comparison, as they would not let you reserve suspended names like the one I wanted. As it had only become free after office hours, I had to re-register it through an internet agency, who afterwards ‘parked’ advertisements on the domain space. These included throw cushions, orthopaedic pillows and a ‘male enhancement’ service, which I felt was stretching it in more ways than I imagined. The internet name had become available on the exact same day that ‘Cushioncraft Limited’ was registered, which I took as auspicious, and accordingly I sacrificed a lizard. On the cultural side, during October as well I visited Manchester City Art Gallery and while pondering their well-organised collection, it occurred to me that I would like to see one of my own designs in such a setting. At the same time I finished reading The Benn Diaries, much to my relief. It was obvious that people were unwilling to engage political diarists like Benn in conversation for fear of finding themselves ridiculed afterward, and I had witnessed the same effect when publishing Final Call. It might simply have meant however that neither of us was at all popular. At the end of the summer contract in Manchester I left Alderley Edge, forsaking a job with the airlines with days of ample leisure for a project that involved none. Back in Hatfield at the bookstore in Welwyn Garden City where I had been promised an autograph session, the manager struggled to recall the title. Although Harper Lee had sold fifty million copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was the only book she wrote, she never gave an interview; I was not at all surprised, for I had sold fifty copies and did not feel like giving one either. Partial compensation came from

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the final episode of Speed Machines, which concentrated on land speed records. I found the exploits of ParryThomas most intriguing, an amateur who fitted a twenty-seven-litre engine to a lorry chassis and reached 170 mph on Pendine Sands, before the chain-driven wheels became unchained and took his head off. The airline contract I had undertaken during the summer of 2003 was a useful benchmark in terms of the project, if not of my career in the business. It was at the beginning in April, while I was staying at the Ibis hotel during training, that I had first outlined the configuration I felt was workable basis for a car with flight capabilities. I did this by taking a pair of flexed panel wings from the ‘Fijian’ flying boat and re­ arranging them lengthways between the sides of a wheeled vehicle. Although I no longer have the diagrams, by the end of the same contract in October I had refined the concept so that it appeared as it does on the frontispiece, which shows UK registered design number 3 014 418. In this, the central fuselage of the flying boat was effectively re-configured as a catamaran, so that the fenders of the vehicle that supported the wheels would also act as buoyant pontoons that made the car amphibious. The panel wings between these pontoons had now been beefed up so that they formed a chassis that besides bridging the two sides also supported a driver (on the forward aerofoil) and the engine (suspended from the rear). The slot that appears behind the canopy was to accommodate the propeller of an aero-engine, which would propel the vehicle along the road, through the water and in skimming flight just above it. Although the arrangement is sound, when I

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contemplated all of the ancillary features that would make it a successful road vehicle, particularly as regards steering, braking and suspension, it looked a more difficult proposition altogether than a simple flying boat. I do not say impossible by any means, but having at least skirted the edges of product development for more than twenty years, my instincts told me that it would take a long time and a lot of money to perfect, and that subsequently it would take equally as long to gain public acceptance. In the ‘dotcom’ age when businesses are built fast, this would not do. The reason the web came to dominate our lives inside fifteen years is that neither suppliers nor consumers need invest too much of anything in it to make it work, which was always its greatest asset and what made it possibly the greatest invention of them all. Looking at it from the consumer perspective alone, it requires only a computer and a telephone line, which you probably have already. To switch to a flying car by contrast, although it might eventually happen the way conventional cars and tarmac roads supplanted horses and dust, it would require a societal or collective investment of the sort that takes time. If we disregard everything but the financial question, this alone involves the passage of time, especially if we consider for instance that at one time the cost of a car amounted to several year’s salary for most people, whereas now it runs to months. It was back in Hertfordshire that it occurred to me that I could as easily switch the side profiles that I had drafted with my French curves for use on a flying boat instead. Between times I received notice that my trademark application for a vehicle called a

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‘cushioncraft’ had failed anyway, as the dictionary described cushion as meaning ‘air cushion’ and craft as referring to airborne or seaborne transport. Trademarks are not allowed to be a literal description of whatever they apply to, but as Orson Welles said, there is no such thing as justice, only luck. The nice thing though about product development though is that you can intersperse the practical side with more cerebral activities like patent searches. This constant introspection is in itself a trademark of success ~ Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire researches the characteristics of lucky people, and it seems they not only persist with problems, but constantly re-examine them from every angle. On the 19th of December therefore (after John Lewis had hosted a Christmas preview for account holders where I gorged on the buffet and bought a metre-rule to assuage my conscience) on the internet I discovered a hovercraft manufacturer offering ground-effect versions of one type; although this was of marginal importance to begin with, its significance grows in step with this narrative and appears from time to time like a thread. Looking at it at this time however it not only seated fewer people than simple hovercraft, but it weighed more and its payload was halved. It went no faster and below 60mph sank back to the surface anyway. Its range was reduced and it was six feet longer, so what had gone wrong? Well it should be emphasised that although technically it appeared to have gone wrong, eventually it proved to be a great success, to the extent it headlined on the website. This also reflects a truism in technology, in that no matter how difficult something

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seems, if you can make it work and it satisfies a need, then it will thrive so long as the economics are right. In this case the problem is easily envisaged, for the recreational craft produced by this company (Universal Hovercraft) normally glide along at ten inches, whereas the type with wings took this up to ten feet. This transforms the ride on a relatively rough surface to something altogether more practicable. So far as my immediate analysis was concerned however, it was clear to me why the addition of wings had on the face of it reduced many of the key performance factors: it was ‘induced’ drag. Anything that flies in air suffers the same sort of drag as a car, which relates to both its shape and surface friction. In addition however, the wings of aircraft have to redirect great volumes of air in order to derive lift from the reaction, and unfortunately this adds a further element of drag. What it meant was that although the twenty-foot wings in this case added some lift, they did so at the expense of both more weight and more drag. For me though the lesson of this conversion was that given wings, almost anything would fly at the surface. During my earliest attempts at modelling different outlines I used chipboard, as it was readily available, though in retrospect it gave entirely the wrong ‘feel’ and burdened not only each model but also the mental process that spawned it. Eventually it led me to abandon the idea temporarily as I could not then see a way of enlarging its scope. One thing you can guarantee with models is that if they do not look right, then scaling them up will solve nothing. And the best I could come up with for test-runs was having the models fly in circles in the church hall (which could be hired by

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the evening) on a length of string. They would have to be powered by electric motors, as the fumes from a petrol engine would linger throughout the subsequent class in macramé. The idea of working into the night behind leaded lights like Uncle Quentin from the Famous Five books, however, had a certain appeal. The gloom only lifted when I learned that limited savings did not debar a claim for Jobseekers Allowance. Accordingly I called at the Job Centre, where the man at the desk told me that they did not get many airline captains. In the section asking if I drove any other vehicle, I put ‘Boeing 737’. He arranged a formal interview for the following week, which tied in nicely with another in St Albans about divorce. It really had been a fabulous day for slashing one’s wrists. At the Woolwich Building Society I even thought about asking the lady at the counter whether suicide invalidated a life insurance policy, though in the event I did not in case it spoiled her day. Instead I drew inspiration from reading my Business Link guide to company formation, though ‘how-to’ guides like this were generally enough to put me off. This one did however feature a man called Peter Manning, whom I drove to Bristol to see next day. A former designer from London, he had devised a flat­ pack water butt that attracted private investors before a French firm secured global rights (for had they been refused, they would develop a product in competition). The most amusing thing about this was that apparently one of the DIY chains employed a man whose sole function was sourcing water butts. Effectively he was the Big Butt. If nothing else, it gave me ideas for all sorts of flat-pack concepts besides my vehicle. Chairs

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for instance are the bread-and-butter of industrial design and I drafted one that was inspired by Peter’s water butt and could be leant against the wall. The significance of all of this however was that I realised the importance of flat-pack products in general, and decided that the principle could be extended to craft like my own to good effect:

The same evening I settled down to a documentary on the loss of space shuttle Columbia, struck by a briefcase-sized piece of foam from a booster rocket, which eventually proved sufficient to shatter the ‘indestructible’ leading edge. This is the value of testing, which invariably confounds expectations. On a smaller scale (but one where the Earth might still move) a doctor in the US had discovered that spinal stimulation produced orgasms in women, and subsequently offered to implant his ‘orgasmotron’ device for £7,000. I have frequently offered to implant

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my own orgasmotron without being offered any monetary reward whatsoever, so he was clearly on to something. On the other hand, £7000 would power a vibrator for a millennium. At the beginning of December I drove to see my accountant in Welwyn. I daren’t tell him I had signed on, as I was already worrying about the effect on my credibility at the bank. Couldn’t we dress up the payments as dividends? Forming a trading company would be disastrous, as I would have to pay myself from my own savings, taxing myself several times over. On the upside, Amazon ordered fifteen more copies of Final Call in the run up to Christmas, and it was remarkable how these things could throw me a lifeline. Nonetheless by the first Saturday in December my wife had obviously had all she could bear, and unable to think of anything else I set off in the car under a lowering sky and drove West, pausing only at Membury services for a picnic, and afterward on the M5 for a cream tea. (It says a lot about the British that tea and biscuits accompany their most angst-ridden moments ~ they are much more likely to opt for one of these before death by firing squad than a cigar.) I think I had set off West because had I gone East I would have arrived in Clacton-upon-Sea within the hour, which would have been enough to finish anybody off. It would have been more sensible had I wanted like Roy Orbison to ‘drive all night’ to have gone North instead toward Scotland, although that was no place to die either. It was at least completely dark by the time I skirted Dartmoor, where eventually I stopped at The Jamaica Inn, which was the only hotel I could remember in Cornwall from thirty years prior.

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Then the road had passed right outside, though inevitably it was now bypassed by a dual carriageway bound for Penzance. Nonetheless beneath scudding clouds a brisk wind still set the sign swinging on its hinges, as in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, yet while the bar looked comfortable I went to bed at six o’clock and hid under the bedclothes, praying for deliverance. I was still there the next day, which I took as a good sign. In fact as suicide raps went, it was one of the best. The morning dawned bright and breezy and I was pleased to be there, which in a way was like finding a ten-dollar note on the way to the electric chair. After a hearty breakfast and a review of the papers by the log fire, I drove down the valley toward Fowey, determined to make a ‘Daphne du Maurier’ weekend of the whole thing. From there I continued on to Falmouth to visit the Small Boat Museum and another cream tea. It housed the overspill from the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and of most interest were their early hydroplanes. It was a boatyard in Ventnor, MA where they first put a pair of sponsons either side of hydroplanes to trap the air underneath, and every one since has been a ‘three-pointer’, where together with the floats the rear propeller forms a tripod. The significance of this was that although planing surfaces had been used to drive fast boats out of the water for years, this was formal recognition of the transition to planing upon a cushion of air. I now hoped to extend the principle further, with a reliable craft that would spend most of its time out of the water altogether. It was prescient that next to the hydroplanes here was an early example of a windsurfer ~ a product which at its inception was perfected by an aerospace engineer.

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Boards of this kind look simple until you hear how they undergo as many as two hundred design iterations. I returned home for a short period that happily coincided with the centenary of flight on the17th December 2003. A century on it was a damp squib, for it rained at Kitty Hawk and the replica Wright Flyer failed to fly, which was unsurprising because computer simulations had already revealed that without a stiff headwind the Wright Brothers would have failed too. Even so their propellers had been remarkably efficient and reminded me of the fact that the water screws designed by Brunel could only be improved upon by five per cent by modern methods. The day however went entirely unmarked in the UK, for the greatest inventions are soon so ingrained as to lose their significance. Proust observed that those who most used new technology were generally its most vocal critics… Around the same time I watched a documentary on the record-breaker, Donald Campbell, which nonetheless suggested that by the time of his death on Coniston his glory days had passed ~ this in fact this had been a doomed attempt to recapture youth in the sort of machine people no longer cared about. (At cards the previous evening he had drawn the Queen of Spades, which Mary Queen of Scots had done before her execution.) They do say you should be careful that your dreams do not come true, and mine had too in every gory detail, so that now I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa at forty-five and working in industrial units a few degrees above. My own retrospective on flight barely outsold the number of aircraft the Wright Brothers had built, and my only consolation was Beckett’s condition that if we fail, then we should fail

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better. (It was after Malcolm McLaren’s teacher told him he should fail flamboyantly that he went on to manage the Sex Pistols.) Had we all been told this at the outset we would not be where we are now, and it was around this particular ‘now’ that I knew I could not give up the day job anytime soon. Soon the circumstances would take me abroad, but for now patents appeared to have ruined my life and led me to believe in some sort of Atlantis teeming with flying cars. Who needed any of my inventions? At a powerboat racing dinner around the time I found myself wondering what I was doing there, with enthusiastic people who enjoyed swapping prizes or tips on tuning outboard motors. Surely, I felt, anything essential to our lives was connected anyway with more rustic pursuits like food and sex; so that at my lowest ebb in search of an easier niche I actually filed a patent specification for a type of feminine condom. The only way was up.

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 ~ rIver rhINestONe COWBOY By now I had given up on either building or ever selling flying cars of the kind I imagined. Though I had thought the flying contract the previous summer would be a one-off, now a whole series of one-offs were in prospect. I took another in June 2004 with a Dutch airline operating in Germany and renewed an acquaintance with the Airbus. In the meantime I had decided the only way I was going to market the platform I had devised for a flying vehicle was as a boat, albeit faster than any other. I continually revised the outline of the side panels and registered the name of ‘hydroblade’ to describe them, because at the time I considered manufacturing these alone in the shape of vertical boards attached to either side of a space frame that formed the chassis. Nobody had seen anything quite like it, and that is actually an obstacle to progress ~ people are much more comfortable with potential products only so long as their neighbour wastes their money on them first, for nobody wants to be the guy with the Betamax. Nonetheless I could then leave whatever was suspended between these blades to my customers, who would have the option of fitting either an outboard or an aero-engine. By August I had finalised the outline of my first blade, although by then the weather had deteriorated. Previously I had been able to take picnics in places nearby like Arnhem. Here in the museum I discovered that the STEN gun had been a Polish attempt to modify the light machine gun that reduced the cost from $600 to $100, by minimising the number of parts.

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This was what I wanted to achieve with the boat. The name of the gun apparently stemmed from the Poles’ initials and the Enfield factory, the way that the AK47 used its designer’s initials and the year of production. Along the road at the DIY I discovered that wooden panels were also 2440 by 1220 mm like the polystyrene panels at home, which was a key consideration for they could always be strapped to the roof of my Peugeot. I purchased 4 mm ply panels along with wooden spars 20 mm thick that I could use to bolster them, while to pad out the interior spaces I selected rolls of foam of the kind that hitchhikers slept upon. Together they cost 140 Euros, although that included an electric ‘glue gun’ that would not look amiss sewn into Bond’s jacket. Finally I chose paint in a shade of grey commonly used on experimental aeroplanes in the USA. August 5th, my father’s birthday, was when I put together my first blade ~ subsequently it was on the same day that the patent specification describing my archetypal type of blade was filed from Brussels ~ and I was impressed by what I had learned. The first lesson was that glue guns were crap, because the glue set on hot days like these as fast as it was fired. Many products are in fact the very last thing we need, and many companies make a living from this deception, as indeed I hoped to myself one day. The second lesson was that by simply flexing the wooden spar that I would use to form the ‘running edge’ of each blade, I could trace around it to save formulating a curve first of all. I liked this as it had connotations of working with ‘living wood’ and linked me to the artisans who crafted longbows from yew in Old England. Of more importance was the fact that it provided a basis upon

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY which anybody could define the curves of these blades without either special knowledge or the tools to go with it; originally I had had to draft the curves on the computer and enlarge the image, afterward assembling it from a ‘pastiche’ of A4 pages the way that David Hockney once faxed his artwork. This first half-sized blade that I built was the size of a Hawaiian surfboard, and if anything it was lighter. It was made like a ‘stud’ wall with a wooden frame to which plywood was attached. I was originally going to include diagonals, though they proved unnecessary because the ply panels on the outside formed a ‘shear web’. Aircraft cabins are made of an aluminium skin attached to a series of ribs, which it reinforces by holding them in place in the same way. Material that resists being pulled apart is said to be good in tension, that which resists being squashed is good in compression, and that resisting twisting is good in torsion. This leaves those materials that do not tear apart easily i.e. those that resist shear forces. In airliners the ribs are good at resisting tension and compression, and the skin forms a web that prevents sliding forces from pulling them apart. Anyway, by the end of the first day I beheld my works and was mightily pleased. It seemed each blade could displace 25,000 cc and thanks to the metric system (in which a cubic centimetre of water weighs one gram) this meant I had fifty kilos of buoyancy from this pair of half-size blades. (As I worked this out a kestrel alighted on my window ledge and speaking of proportions, this was much bigger than it ought and we both fell from our perches.) The next day before going flying I finished the second blade in half the time, confirming Adam Smith’s theory that

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manufacturing proceeds at a greater rate when broken down into repetitive tasks requiring little thought: a condition we have all suffered from since. I filled even more of this blade with foam, and had to open up the first to do the same. Each blade used fifty screws for assembly and undoing these persuaded me that subsequent blades should be glued instead. I painted each blade, but as they were going to be fibre-glassed I did wonder whether it was wise. The battle-ship grey also made the blades look particularly shark-like; to the extent I considered painting jaws on each. The airline had also given us grey uniforms that would look decidedly complementary during my sea-trials. I would look like Kurt Jurgens and be able to shout things like ‘Englisher U-boot, Snell, Snell!’ at whichever pleasure-cruisers I chose on the nearby River Maas:

For supplies of fibreglass I travelled to Kleve, a historic town on the Rhine where I could buy fabric from 1.2 metre rolls. I also took a tub of silica, which they told me gave resin the consistency of Nutella. I liked the idea, and imagined that Gordon Ramsay would never

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY omit a soupcon of silica from his own resin mixes, although mine formed lumps like those in my cheese sauces. Initially I mixed too much resin as well, which because it was a catalytic reaction threatened to catch alight and flambé itself. Resins begin to gel after twenty minutes, and so it feels much like having to decorate at the end of a shotgun ~ if you think the sands of time wait for no man, check out the epoxies. As I impregnated it with resin however (the technical term was ‘laying up’, which to my mind implied the same thing), my fibreglass cloth proved remarkably creasefree and it seemed I was better at this than ironing. I worried over how to seal the edges of the blades (and still do), for bonded products are all prone to delaminating, or falling apart at the seams. All in all I got a good deal of pleasure from using these West System resins and the finished blades proved to be as straight as dies, left overnight to dry in the room next door like someone awaiting a State burial. I had heard of West System from a hitchhiker who lived on a boat in Sussex: a sort of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Epoxy Resins. Originally the product was from the Gougeon Brothers, who sounded like a seafood starter, but were to boat building what the Wrights had been to aeroplanes. They began by building iceboats to use on the frozen lakes nearby, which are like landyachts with skates instead of wheels. The brothers were among the first to notice that resin adhesives had crept into aircraft construction from furniture, and wondered if there were any benefit in smearing it over boats. From these almost sexual beginnings an industry was born, for after plywood is coated in this way they discovered it was as strong again. When eventually the

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wood was replaced altogether by glass fibre, this ‘composite’ material was stronger and lighter again. Like me though the Gougeon Bros had had to harangue boatyards or furniture workshops for their supplies of resin, and eventually benefited by providing it more widely in small containers. This food chain is what keeps the world of commerce turning, and all that retailers effectively do is to distribute things in smaller units. Some supermarkets in Germany did not even try to do this, but left produce packed on pallets and barely unwrapped. Although piling boxes in aisles rarely attract the go-getters, retailers have surreptitiously taken over the world like global warming. The morning after this frenzy of construction I felt decidedly less inspired, and it is strange the way schemes that take flight over a weekend crash to earth like this on a Monday morning, when we realise how we depend upon our boss to give our lives form and meaning after all. I was awoken by unearthly noises from the gravel pits, I guessed because the wind was in the wrong direction, and staggered around like an unearthed mole before returning to bed after egg and coffee. Creative types need their sleep. I was depressed about how I was going to power my half-scale ‘blade boat’, for in terms of scale it had fallen between two stools. It was too small for an outboard motor, and much too big for a model. Nor would it fit in the car. In fact its only value was that it had convinced me that there was some mileage in the concept and taught me how to put it together. Nothing in life is wasted, not even an afternoon in Stevenage. I was convinced though that out there somewhere model outboard motors did exist, and eventually I

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY found a firm in America that made them, yet the details were blocked by the company firewall. Feeling like a laboratory rat separated from its cheese by Perspex, I gave up and drove to Kevelaer instead where at least there was a model shop. Here young Oliver told me that he was not able to order one of these outboards, but instead showed me a Japanese type that I ordered for 340 Euros. Seeing an electric version in the same catalogue I took one too, and left the store feeling like a scale version of Howard Hughes. Even at this early stage too I decided that to control the reaction to the thrust that these engines would provide, I might consider using a tail plane, which I could also use to connect my blades at the rear of the boat. On one of these days too I simply got up and tidied the workshop next door. There is a story of a Buddhist novice who arrives at a monastery to ask how to proceed with enlightenment, and is told to begin by doing the dishes. This is something I could imagine my wife saying. Through a focus on the mundane however Buddhists feel we are able to achieve the transcendent: what you could call the hoover-toheaven theory. The path to successful invention is strewn with such trivia, and only by concentrating on the goal can we keep moving. Nor did I feel that there was any particular hurry, although Arthur Andersen’s ad campaign of the time urged us to believe that we should hurry in case someone walked off with our idea, although frankly they had an agenda. Personally I believed the only winner ought to be the idea itself. Amen. The model engines I had ordered were designed for boats of up to a metre, and so I hoped to halve the original scale and produce models at 1.2 metres, one

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for the electric and another for the piston engine. The electrically powered type I intended to run in circles while tethered, and the other would be radio controlled. They were small enough both to be carried in the car and to be taken in mentally. When I was at school a touring show had passed through Ormskirk that included a preserved whale inside a trailer. I was not persuaded to see it (and later missed the death mask of Tutankhamen, the spectacle of moon-rock and Liverpool’s Champion’s League victory in Istanbul), and was told anyway by those who went that it was as exciting as a creosote fence. Firstly it was amply covered in tar to prevent it from festering ~ as a festering whale could really spoil your day ~ and secondly it was simply too big to take in at close quarters. The place to see these dudes was off the coast of Boston and not on a low-loader in Lancashire. Meanwhile during approaches to runway 27 at Niderrhein Airport I had noticed a dilapidated house in the woods, a little short of the perimeter road, and one fine evening set off to investigate. Through the undergrowth I discovered the sort of house that Hansel and Gretel might have occupied, except that outside were a caravan, a railway wagon and any number of abandoned vehicles enjoying twilight lives as filing cabinets. One had an array of pinecones lodged at the foot of the windscreen. Here then was a soul clearly disappointed by the press of life, yet sensitive to its consolations. I forbore the temptation to knock on the door and ask, but wondered what had pissed him, as Shakespeare might have asked, life or love? Inventions themselves are like offspring, and those abandoned on paper have as much chance of survival

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY as a newborn in the forest. If you make a half-hearted prototype, you’ve left them at the crawling stage, but build a working model and you might have a Romulus or Remus. Raise it for years, however, speak of it with pride among associates, parade it before society and lavish a lifetime of savings upon it, and then you may just find that you have created something worthwhile. If you are luckier it will move in directions you neither intended nor anticipated, and live on despite of you and yet because of you. What are our lives anyway if not ideas in action? I was still unsure that I could be single-track enough to get up each day and find boats inspiring though. I had so fallen out with the idea of a flying car that this latest incarnation was intended exclusively as a boat, with its catamaran blades restricted to water. Although I did wonder whether a portfolio of designs was possible, for I had recently seen Jack Vettriano’s gallery in London and noticed that artists ran up a body of work until such time as they could be ‘discovered’. We generally associate inventors by contrast with only a single invention, whether they like it or not, so it would pay to choose a good one (which explained my obsession with flying cars). Society also views inventions as a leap of progress, but when they are analysed more closely they are anything but. To make sense of the world we codify it, and I wanted ‘Hilton’ to mean ‘Hydroblade’. Inventing certainly had its moments, like when I went to Wesel to source materials and found myself enjoying wine and antipasti instead in sunshine by the Rhine. Nearby were the remains of a railway bridge that was almost certainly destroyed during the war,

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and in the north of Germany in particular such reminders were rarely far away if you knew how to look. Returning to Laarbruch I was arrested by the sight of twenty balloons launching from a field, a sight that had drawn a large crowd, for some things excite the imagination of everyone from seven to seventy: these things and sex mainly. Among them was one like an ice-cream cone, and my heart swelled to see it bore a UK registration. We may not have been a force any more in shaping transport, but here was a raspberry ripple for Johnny Foreigner to look up to. There was also a hot-airship, which the locals wrongly called a Zeppelin ~ as I pointed out to them before being ejected. It had the performance of a flying slug, yet soon caught up with the balloons drifting downwind toward Gennep. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was clearly king, for despite its floppiness the concept clearly worked. This is after all the key to progress: ignore the speculation, put it together and see what it can do. On another day in the rain I set off to see a composites concern in Remscheid. I would often transport sheet materials at twenty-five kilometres an hour from hardware stores in Germany, and it elicited only understanding from my fellow motorists. Had I done the same in London, doubtless I would have been hung from a tree. Driving to Remscheid though took only ninety minutes, because while fast roads and cheap beer sound a bad idea, they obviously worked here. The firm in Remscheid was on an industrial estate, with the usual thirty-year-old guide at the entrance that was ideal if you were looking for that whalebone corset factory.

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY It turned out only to be a distribution centre, but I was still like a kid in a candy store. It has been said that the best technology looks like magic, and composite materials pass this test. I also discovered that the word for a sample in German is ‘muster’, which of course is echoed in the English phrase ‘to pass muster ’. Although the hollow tubes of carbon-fibre here weighed almost nothing I could barely bend them and I guessed they were 2% Carbon and 98% Viagra. I had come in search of honeycomb panels of the type used for aircraft floors, light and yet strong, though they only had rolls of the stuff that comprised the internal packing, looking like something the bees had made. Similarly in its raw state the carbon fibre looked like horsetail. Mixed with epoxy resin however they were impregnable, and the SP Systems catalogue adequately described composites as ‘two or more materials, whose special properties combine to give each more strength than it would otherwise possess’. The next day because the weather was nice and because it was not every day you had Holland next door, I drove to Den Bosch. In its medieval square was a travelling fair, and I briefly considered taking the Ferris wheel for a birds-eye view, before realising I would be the only sad bastard in my gondola. Instead I found a charming alleyway filled with restaurants and people eating mussels, drinking wine and singing traditional songs. It was only spoiled for me by the fact that I had already eaten at MacDonald’s, which was only because I had used their toilet. People born in the 1950s tended to think that way. September was another month with little tangible progress on the project, although every military

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commander knows that keeping the objective in sight and always moving forward is generally half the battle. I had made a great step forward by ‘rediscovering’ the foam-sandwich concept for myself, for eventually I had abandoned the idea of using internal wooden frames and made my blades by cutting the profiles from polystyrene panels and skinning them with layers of both plywood and glass-fibre, which was lighter, quicker and stronger altogether. In a TV programme I had once seen about the millionaire ‘mindset’ it was obvious that most entrepreneurs missed the days when the goal lay over the hill. I was conscious of this each day I rose in the sunshine and reminded myself that having something to work on was a blessing in itself, in a world where one half struggled for the sort of riches that the other half were unhappy with. I was stirred one day however when I returned from work to find a message to say that Mr Hilton was needed in Kevelaer. This raised suspicion immediately because most of what made my car legal had lapsed, although it was from the hobby shop, where my motors had arrived. Work had expanded to fill the time available and neither of my models was ready, although admittedly I had spent some of my time visiting Utrecht to see its Post Office, which was an iconic example of Art Deco roof-building:

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY In Amsterdam too I revisited the ship museum I failed to get into on my honeymoon. It was overwhelmingly skewed toward past achievements (unlike the Technology Museum in Berlin with its unparalleled collection of outboard motors), but there was an interesting feature on windsurfers. They were first manufactured by a company that made polyester curtain material, obviously intent upon diversifying once demand for their curtains went the way of Bri­ nylon shirts and the first series of Star Trek. They introduced them in 1972, when they sold only ten, but three years on they were selling 5,000 per year and five years later they were moving 50,000 units. I left with the sound of cash tills ringing in my ears. The next day I arranged to meet a Dutch girl who eventually failed to turn up, which was something I expected as a teenager, but not thirty years on. I had forgotten this dating thing with its dashed expectations and futile longings, and was half-convinced that having found company I would sneak back to the workshop anyway, for romance and projects like mine share a cycle of anticipation and ennui. I drew comfort from the fact that I had perfected my foam-sandwich technique, though in an interesting setback one day the glue I had chosen worked through the polystyrene and onto the floor. I found often though that it all seemed pointless, and the test of any project, like a marriage, is to see whether it persists even when there seems little reason for it persisting. In fact the older I got, the more convinced I was that the solution to anything was to cease speculating and take action: any form of action. So now I set off for the modelling convention in Kevelaer, where I

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found that model railways dominated the proceedings. Germany was their spiritual home, though they had come a long way since my childhood. Computers now commanded the layouts as in the real world, except that here there were no pile-ups like in Britain. Some of the locomotives had cameras fitted so that the view from the cab appeared on-screen, and I could almost imagine people throwing themselves off the platforms on Monday mornings. It transported me back to the set that my father constructed in the loft that proved too big to remove; he had mixed industrial quantities of vermiculite from work along with wallpaper paste to produce a positively Himalayan backdrop that would have entirely eclipsed the felt-cloth and rubber trees that I saw here. Despite these pastimes I was soon back flying after a long interval on standby, while at the same time I was soliciting a new contract in Venice for the winter. I wanted to launch the boat at full scale in the coming months and doing this on a lagoon here was preferable to freezing my nuts off on the River Maas. I finished sealing my remaining model blades and provided the coup de grace by running fabric tape around the perimeters. Returning once to the DIY when I had not bought enough of this, I timed the journey and found that each of the dozens of trips I had made took over half an hour, and it was easy to see how I was wasting my life. Toward the end of the September I returned to Kleve as well to look for a mobile, in order to make calls to the UK cheaper. There was a queue of six, yet the manager was having an extended conversation with one couple as if there was nobody else waiting. After the old guy behind me walked out I

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY shouted across to the manager to say that he had lost at least one customer. When I did this the old guy froze like he’d been caught in the searchlights, while the customer behind me told me that the service was generally useless: and he was German. I was so cheesed off that I left and drove through the rain to a gallery in The Hague to see Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Meanwhile the airline teetered on bankruptcy and added urgency to the exercise. I was fast learning the value of cash flow, because I was having to pay landing fees with ready money. I decided that my own company would thrive on the three ‘C’s: Confidence, Cashflow and Colin. I was happy though for I felt that I now had something that could be manufactured, and I foresaw full-size blades made as kits in workshops or by mass-production. I documented the construction of my 160 centimetre blades with my camera, as they looked quite professional. Pressing the sandwiches required a substantial weight, and the radiators I had removed from my room in the accommodation block (British types of 1950s vintage) were ideal because they were heavy as traction engines. My German landlords however would have been less impressed however if ever they reactivated the central heating and like Ebeneezer I still live each day with the shame. The blinds on my windows were pure bamboo from IKEA and I was woken each day by the sun creeping around the corner. On the last Sunday here I woke naturally in this way to a bowl of Special K and a long-wave transmission of the Sunday service. My diet here was generally healthy simply because I rarely shopped. Afterward I donned my boots and headed for the woods, where among fern leaves made

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fluorescent by the sunshine I stumbled across wild boar, which stampeded when the largest male saw me and grunted something needing no translation. Afterwards in what I liked to call my ‘studio’ I retrieved the latest blades from the press and removed the surplus foam before cutting glass-fibre cloth to suit and applying it with resin. Foregoing paint this time, when I finished each blade had a natural finish like a Gibson Les Paul. I always looked forward to seeing the results each morning in the way that as a child I anticipated Christmas. Whether this was good thing at age forty-five I neither knew nor cared. Something I cared more about was not yet having been paid for flying in September, for there was talk of foreclosure. A project like mine was in a way like having a child, in that it gave me a separate objective for which every ill was endured and every whim subordinated. As to my personal circumstances, I had been occupying a room at the end of a block with sixty others, with a second used as a workshop. I shared a bathroom with the few other itinerant pilots with whom I shared the block: one Scottish, another English and Henkwillem, who was from Holland. In the summer he had bought a barbeque and on the warmest evenings we regularly set out plastic chairs in the car park and chewed the fat. The airport authorities actually wanted us out, but they left us with electrical power and a water supply on the understanding that we did not ‘officially’ exist, which was a very German solution to the problem, as anyone who has lived there would know, for at least it tidied up the paperwork. On October 14th however the airline collapsed, which for my project was like the implosion of the

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GerMANY, AuG 2004 rIver rhINestONe COWBOY Soviet Union. Its death throes lasted a week, and after assembling in the sunshine for a meeting with administrators (which in our best clothes felt like either a wedding or funeral, I was not sure which) I overloaded the car and returned home. I took the boat as I had done when I left for the continent five months previously, except that then all had been hope and blue skies, while now the wind whipped up foaming crests beneath the lowering sky. Stood at the rear of the ferry I almost felt destined to build sea-going craft like the great Brunel… or at least, I felt, the palm-top version.

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turkeY, JAN 2005 ~ It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet Arriving back at Hatfield presented its problems and foremost among them was the loss of my workshop. To pass the time profitably I called on R aitzen Technologies to apprise them of developments. Their existence was based upon getting grants out of government departments, a game with rules known only to the initiated. This is especially true at the European level, where funding programmes are seemingly designed to deter individuals, who are the source of every successful idea. Entrepreneurs have always succeeded despite governments and not because of them. Though Raitzen clearly served a purpose, I liked the idea of working unaided. The sentiment was inspired by one of the larger Japanese corporations (I think it was Matsushita), which had always prided itself on never having called upon government money anywhere since its inception. Toward the end of November in 2004 I also contacted SP Systems, who like West System supplied composites. Martin Armstrong was responsible for technical issues and liked my ideas, so I arranged to meet him in Cowes. The chief executive had got into selling resins from a workshop in New Zealand, stemming from an interest in sailing. Now he ran an organisation supplying ocean racing and Formula One teams. Martin recommended panels made of styroacrylicnitride (SAN) foam that they manufactured in Canada under the name Core-Cell. It was as strong as wood but a good deal lighter, and of course more consistent. One drawback of using it was that it took

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet ten weeks to ship. Another was its cost. Nonetheless I set about designing blades with cheaper cores bound by panels of Core-Cell of different thicknesses. At the same time experiments with 20 mm CoreCell persuaded me to try a centre-section made entirely of foam, to replace the metal superstructure that I had previously envisaged. I registered its design in the UK, though my patent agent informed me this had been a mistake, for it was to be published inside three months for all the world to see, while the same material in the form of a patent application would not be revealed for up to eighteen months. Sometimes though you simply had to flaunt it:

Happily in November I also received a lump sum from the Social Security program in Holland, and they invited me to sign on, though the idea of flying to Amsterdam each week to do this stretched even my own sense of the absurd. At the same time the Revenue in the UK was losing interest, and if I remained abroad, then maybe love affair would never be rekindled. Accordingly I chased up a contract in Istanbul, which took many weeks to eventuate, as EC pilot licences

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did not stretch to Turkey. Unification of the various licences only meant anyway that although you could work anywhere, there was any number of candidates from all corners of Europe and the status of airline pilots was reduced to that of migrant strawberry pickers. I shipped out just before Christmas and took up residence in the airport hotel. I advise anybody against living permanently in a hotel unless they are either Greta Garbo or a born-again Buddhist. I still had plans to extend my workshop activity to this outpost of British influence, which centred upon room 323 at the Radisson. A search of the net showed that the few companies active in fibreglass were an hour’s drive down the coast, and besides, the fact I could not order gum from a gas station in Turkish bode ill for ordering Multi-Purpose Epoxy System Type 106. And while I thought the living would be cheap, there was a price for Turks and another for foreigners with thick fleeces. The only ray of sunshine was the upcoming boat show, which was advertised as the 14th largest in the world, a fact only tarnished by them failing to say how many there were. There may only have been fifteen. As the tailoring was cheap however I wondered for a while whether to join the glass-fibre material around the seam like a form of cushion cover that I could slip over each blade before applying the resin. This was nice in view of the company being called Cushioncraft. Cushion cases have at least one side open, and it was while jogging in the gym that I realised that footballs appear seamless. They have plastic panels that are sewn together and turned inside out, but in the same way that a sock needs a hole for this, one of the panels must be left open… so how could they

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet conceal the final seam? I knew not, and looking at Google it seemed nobody else did either. It was like I had been asking whether the Earth moved around the Sun during the time of Galileo. Even Adidas merely said the seam was hidden because each panel was ‘sewn with a different kind of needle’. This seemed to me more like the way that parents deflected teenage queries about sex. As the blades tapered at either end, I liked the idea of fitting separate fibreglass sleeves from each, which would be immensely strong (as anyone who has tried to pull the leg off a pair of jeans can appreciate). At the same time I toyed with ways of eliminating the edges of each blade altogether, so that they were shaped more like a tuna that was filled with expanding foam instead. Like so many variations on the theme, none of these ideas ever came to fruition. Meanwhile I was liaising with a pattern maker in the UK called Brett, who made moulds for a variety of fibreglass products including boats. I had originally been pointed in his direction whilst looking for materials for a previous project. A feature of business is that you are well advised to go back to whomever you are most comfortable with for supplies, and while I had spoken to bright young things in Cornwall doing exciting things with computers, Brett’s practical approach was in tune with my own. The mistake many high-tech projects made was to be too high-tech, too soon. The reason Alexander the Great or Napoleon were adept at military campaigning was that they knew that what most interested soldiers were full stomachs, and this nut-and-bolt approach is what makes people like Richard Branson so successful; when I distributed promotional copies of my last book,

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only he and Barbara Cassani had the foresight to reply. Naturally if I were in a position to steer any business their way (not that they need it), then of course I would. After two months I had done all the sightseeing I needed and my range was circumscribed by the lack of a car. It even snowed solidly for a week, marooning us in the hotel. On one day during this time one co­ pilot called another for assistance in the lobby, where an old guy had collapsed, and while they resuscitated him he still turned blue (which did not make me feel too good either) and was taken away by ambulance. When he returned it turned out that he was once an architect in America, with a hand in the iconoclastic TWA terminal at JFK; after retiring he returned to Istanbul with his wife. This much I discovered from his daughter, herself an expert on the ‘curtain walls’ that are used to cloak modern buildings in glass, and she herself had been invited to work on the replacement for the World Trade Center. She was also a pianist, linguist, mathematician and yachtswoman, but I still beat her at pool. As with all achievers, their was an element of ‘anything you can do I can do better’ about her, but this was probably central to her success: over­ confident people habitually over-estimate their abilities and consequently accomplish extraordinary things, for theirs is a triumph of expectation over calculation. I went to the boat show in Istanbul after Ellen Macarthur had circumnavigated the world, which I felt gave me some credibility among the pink champagne set. I was surprised there was no entrance fee, especially after having paid fifteen quid in London. Exhibitions are often more productive than the internet, which can be so indeterminate as to be like

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet wandering around a library in the hope of meeting Tom Stoppard. Among the first stands I encountered was that of a resin producer not ten-minutes from the hotel. While looking for another, I found a Turkish company making fibreglass matting, having diversified from interlining manufacture. Interlining is the fabric inside the lining of a jacket and like the air around us, though it is invisible there is lots of it. The man who was demonstrating the material was from a firm in Yorkshire and his company produced silicone ‘bladders’ to use in moulding fibreglass. Beside the luxury yachts, which are generally Arabmagnets, the best stands were those of vertically integrated outlets like Volvo, as in ‘You’ve driven the car, now try our contra-rotating stern-drive’. I got close up and personal with any number of outboard motors too. These are beautifully integrated products, complete in themselves, unlike inboards that are like dismembered limbs: nice in a way but clearly missing something. I always cause consternation at these shows as well by lying on the floor to scrutinise the underside of racing boats, something I could have done with many of the women on these stands too. Looking at the motors I was always figuring out what could be removed to make them lighter, a habit that vexed my mother whenever I dismantled vacuum cleaners to turn them into ducted fans. This trait was probably inherited from my great uncle, who became a director of Philips in the USA and was the first of us to make a million. Galvanised by the boat show, on Valentine’s Day I converted my hotel room into a workshop, removing the second bed and replacing it with a trestle table liberated from the conference hall. I unpacked my tools

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and set about designing my legendary ‘Ottoman’ blade, which I felt combined the curves of the harem with a hint of Mongol menace. Whereas once I drafted profiles with French curves and scaled them up, now I worked directly on paper, using the technique from Germany that involved flexing laths of wood to create the curves. After eyeing up the Venetian blinds in reception, I asked the hotel if there was a basement full of crap, like in every other hotel. The brochure had said that we must ask if there was anything we needed during our stay, and I figured this might stretch to tooling. After a full minute myself in the basement I had a ‘spare’ length of skirting board although flexing and tracing around it involved at least three hands. Eventually I co-opted a French co-pilot and told him that one day he would be famous. Ordinarily I would advise against approaching young men and saying, ‘Come up to my room and I’ll make you famous.’ To round off the corners of the profile of each blade I used a can of mixed nuts from my mini-bar. This was not only how the West was won, but you could also eat the compasses afterwards. While I was bogged down too in trying to formulate a means of producing blades by a process of foam injection, I drew inspiration from a story in the Turkish Daily News about a Mr Polat from Izmir. He had had no education and from the age of eleven was apprenticed in a workshop. Fascinated with the machine-tool industry and frustrated by the that fact his country had always to import the parts required for olive pressing equipment, he went to trade shows and replicated parts of Italian, German and English machines from memory. Later he organised illicit

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet factory visits to glean this information, to the extent he was banned from Germany and Italy for industrial espionage. In time he so improved olive-pressing machinery from Europe that eventually they came to him for product improvements instead. Shortly after the boat show too I called the man from Yorkshire that I had met to see if he wanted to discuss vacuum-infusion techniques over a beer. (The process involves ‘bagging up’ moulds and removing the air with a vacuum, which creates pressure to both form the product and suck in resin to soak the fabric. It is fast replacing manual ‘lay-up’ operations, which is like pasting wallpaper.) Of course the danger in calling anyone and suggesting you meet to discuss methodology was that there was a chance they would simply assume that you were gay instead. For this reason, or because he had spent all day with his face in resin, Jonathon failed to return my call. To compound my misery I caught a glimpse of a private rocket-ship on TV that had sent a civilian into space. Using similar materials, Burt Rutan had put someone into orbit while I had not got beyond room 323. While in Germany I had used plywood and polystyrene, now on visits home I was able to bring back supplies of both resin and Core-Cell. At the same time I had driven to Rye to give the go-ahead to a company that advertised itself as building ‘working models’ and it was to them I delegated the electrical blade boat before leaving again for Turkey. The piston engine was going to Istanbul, where a modeller I met at the boat show was to fit it to my blades. (He spoke no English, and was yet to learn of my plans for him in the quest for world domination.) I drove to Hamble

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too and spent two hours in Brett’s workshop, eating chicken sandwiches and discussing full-sized blades. Brett leaned toward conventional methods involving fancy moulds and gel-coats, yet I imagined that only by using the sort of techniques a monkey could learn quickly would I become obscenely rich. After I returned to the hotel I was unable to sleep, and had a breakthrough in the early hours. Recalling that the pond in the garden was made of metal-resin compound (which is resin mixed with powdered metal), it occurred to me that such material would share many of the structural qualities of cast alloy, while being amenable to cold casting. It could be substituted for metal in a one-stop process, if for no other reason than to fit a rim around the edges of my blades. This was a patent application in itself, though while I was home I had received the search results from another. Now although the search on the subject of flying cars had been entertaining and apposite, the ‘prior art’ produced by that on the boat was wholly irrelevant, and included the inevitable design from California that featured a ludicrous contraption of no use to anybody:

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet The search that produced this wonder of nature was based upon my own description of the original ‘blade boat’, which featured a pair of floats linked by a skeleton chassis and fitted with an outboard motor along with a nosecone (the cherry on the icing). The patent agent now recommended I abandon it altogether, for it was too vague. Half the battle in winning patent protection lies in describing something that is obviously new in a way that makes it sound obviously new: the most famous example of a refusal of course being the Sony Walkman, because technically the idea of a portable music player went back to Edison’s time. Even fanciful references that appear in children’s comics are sufficient to disprove that an idea is entirely original. From henceforth I resolved to concentrate on sandwich panels. At this stage because the ‘filling’ was always softer it was in the firing line, and the principal design problem lay in finding ways to harden the edges. So that I could apply a harder coating I tried recessing the polystyrene foam with a cigarette lighter, an exercise that came close to setting off the hotel sprinkler system. Epoxy resin, or ‘araldite’ as it is better known, can be thickened with a variety of fillers, like the silica I used in Germany. In Turkey I was at a loss over what to use, but after I was told that talcum powder worked I bought a large bottle of baby powder and although it worked, it left the boat gently scented (which I felt might meet the requirements of a reformed ~ and pinker ~ Royal Navy). Shopping for more abstruse materials was always a challenge, as when I ventured into Sefakoy, the district next to the hotel, in search of primer paint. I

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knew neither the words for ‘grey or ‘paint’ (which in Turkish was ‘boya’, a word I could be forgiven for not guessing). The Turks came from the Steppes, from whence they went north and east as well as south, so that the language was improbably related to both Finnish and Japanese. Eventually I settled for a tin of cellulose paint, a brush and thinners and including lunch it cost less than a few pounds. I was struck by the Dickensian conditions in endless basement workshops that were yet to be illuminated by the gentle ministrations of health and safety. The Turks themselves felt the problem was a vicious circle that described long hours and marginal productivity and as an inventor, my first duty lay in discovering a means to stay in bed longer. I was struck however by the servitude and monotony of my own life as well, for looking back I had always seemed to be living in expectation of the Big Break over the horizon; whereas now I realised that this was the condition of life, a work in progress on a future that never arrived. It probably explained the cult of celebrity, for Western society had lost the deities of antiquity, and celebrities fulfilled what people had once required of these supra-human beings: like not looking shit in the morning or needing to find paint in Sefakoy. Like the gods, our celebrities had passions and weaknesses yet went beyond us in their excesses. So Tara Palmer-Tomkinson loved not like us but too much, that we could relish each fall. Other celebrities were like Roman deities of different things, so that Diana Spencer was the goddess of women scorned, or David and Victoria Beckham paragons of a problematic marriage.

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet And while I was at it, something else that gave me pause was the E5, the highway outside my window that skirted Istanbul’s western suburbs. It was frequently gridlocked, six lanes in either direction. Its flow numbered thousands of vehicles, which contributed to a yellow pall lying over the city that was replicated in every city in the world, places like Shanghai, where in only months cars had effectively replaced bicycles. We were creating a machine for taking oil out of the ground and turning it into an ocean of gases. Even the level of light in the sky on the sunniest days ~ its simple luminosity ~ was reduced by the particles of soot that this produced, falling since the 1950s by ten per cent in the USA and by fifteen in the UK. And here I was about to chip in my own two-penny worth. Within days I did discover that DIY stores existed in Gunesli nearby (which was also Turkish for ‘sunny’ ~ how blessed were they who lived in Sunny). They proved to be a Shangri-la for hardware lovers like myself, with a selection of yellow polystyrene panels. The selection was superior to that in the UK, which I could only explain by the fact that building regulations were more relaxed here and they were building like Topsy. Istanbul was a city of make-do and mend, and until recently the planning laws had allowed any house built during the hours of darkness to remain intact, so for years the fringes of the city grew in this way. What I also liked about these panels was that they matched the colour of my Core-Cell, and I decided to leave subsequent models in natural yellow. I would register the latest construction as a design too, for it now featured rounded blades and included a simple deck in-between that connected at four corners and

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looked like rawhide. To draw it I had found giant compasses at the DIY and for a press I co-opted two upturned coffee tables and a standard lamp. To the cleaners it must have looked like a satanic altarpiece. I also visited Rahmi Koc’s museum on the Golden Horn. He had been inspired by the English reverence for industrial heritage, and the place was filled with American cars, English steam engines and Italian motorboats; so what more could anyone ask of a Saturday morning? Elevated on a column was a Dakota airliner of 1940s vintage that you could sit in, which I did. (Airliners built much after 1960 lost every vestige of character, probably because like family they were too close to be appreciated.) At the museum I had to withdraw the opinion that Berlin held the best collection of vintage outboard motors, for it was here; plus their collection of Riva motorboats was unmatched. Rivas were water carriages for the jet set, and I was interested to see that they finally surrendered hardwood for fibreglass in 1973. In its first manifestations fibreglass had looked intrinsically tacky, associated as it was with the Reliant Robin. (Talking of materials, something equally entertaining was the Bulgarian Orthodox Christian church nearby. These were not usually my bag, but this one was made entirely of cast iron sections so that it looked like it had just sailed in.) In March of 2005 eight thousand urologists descended on Istanbul for a congress. For urinary surgeons, this was bigger than the Oscars, and when I returned to the hotel I was confronted by seminars on premature ejaculation. I asked the girls for a brochure, so that I could slip it under the French pilot’s door

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet along with a note to say they had his ‘problem’ under control. I later realised that by asking for a brochure ‘for a good friend’ I would probably be labelled the ‘PE’ guy myself for the remainder of the week. It was also the ninetieth anniversary of Gallipoli, a campaign that claimed 120,000 lives, and I went to the cinema to see a documentary of the same name that was only partially spoiled by being in Turkish. I resolved to go in the springtime, having already been to Arnhem. On the modelling front it was all coming together. The method of construction I had formulated was an inexpensive way of fast-tracking prototypes, and the flying car could be based on the boat I was building, except with a flying surface and set of wheels. People yearned to be transported beyond the mundane, and for this there would be none better than a flying car. But like Henry Ford I appreciated that the production was more than the car. I did not want to abandon faster means of travelling on water, but sea transport pressed few people’s buttons while flying cars would make history. Accordingly on the 19th March 2005, a day that will probably not go down in the annals, in addition I set about drafting a similar profile for one of these. And I wanted it to look like a car, for there were ‘flying car’ projects out there that flew, but to my mind they were not cars. Instead they were ‘roadable’ aeroplanes, and much of the thinking then was that if we were to fly direct, it would take this form; whereas I liked to think we could incorporate the notion in a more conventional form instead. For a while then (for so long as it would take for my fever to abate) I turned away from developing boats and the latest of these now languished under the

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workbench like a child displaced from my affections. It had been hurriedly assembled with toothpicks in order that I could photograph the design for UK registration, which knowing me was probably a subliminal means of closure:

The design had proven the integrity of sandwiched composites, even when it included cutaways, and it had established that a simple deck could be used to join the side panels. The car I envisaged would be even stronger as it was double-decked, with a separate floor pan and stabiliser section that formed a ‘box’ structure when viewed from astern. Initially I would need only the outline of wheels, for it was important not to be distracted by any one aspect at the expense of the overall concept. When Whittle developed the jet, he stuck to a simple air compressor of the kind in any vacuum cleaner, for the most difficult part to get right was the combustion chamber, so much so that for a while the Germans gave up and switched from liquid fuel to gas. Even the suggestion of an idea, enthuses people, and we all enjoy a bit of smoke and mirrors. As a part of this development I felt I ought to sub­

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turkeY, JAN 2005 It’s A MAGIC CAr, Pet contract the testing of this boat and on March 22nd I crossed the Bosporus to the Anatolian side where I met the model builder from the boat show. Kaan Ozten, one of the Turkish co-pilots was able to translate my English for the benefit of Emirhan. We agreed a price of €500, with a down payment of 525 YTL drawn there and then from a cash machine. I must have been bonkers, and during the return trip there was a violent manoeuvre around a stationary ship that convinced me the pilot had been asleep. Welcome to Turkey. Easter occurred early and the break was productive, as I took the template for the car and cut it out. I still had angst in my pants over which type of motor to power the model with; should I use a conventional propeller, or a discontinued fan unit from a one-man band? You could have guessed really, and I returned to Istanbul with a fan whose maintenance depended on a man in Northamptonshire. Peter had designed the fan units when model jets looked silly driven by propellers. They had been supplanted by tiny jet engines, though these were four times as expensive. It surprised me that fan units were dying out, because they propelled every airliner out there because they were more efficient. Model aircraft however required no fuel efficiency, in view of the fact they were not called upon to cross the Atlantic. Thus the ducted fan unit that I imagined would make the real flying car a practicality was effectively absent at this scale, which eventually went a long way toward my reassessment of the feasibility of the whole idea. The springs from which the aeroplane emerged were muddied from the start, and it would be no different if the car ever flew. Besides the Wright brothers, the only other player in the US was the

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government-sponsored Professor Langley at the Smithsonian. His launch catapult cost $ 20,000 while the rails the brothers used cost $4, which tells you all you need to know about funding. Until1982 the Smithsonian claimed Langley’s was the first aircraft capable of flight, and so Orville Wright entrusted the Wright Flyer to a museum in London. Then NASA proved the Langley aircraft would have broken up, as did Langley himself after his failure. Now as NASA announced a Personal Air Vehicle program it seemed the same drama might be played out in this century.

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers At the start of April, pictures arrived of the electrical boat that Ian at ‘Working Models’ had tested in his father’s swimming pool (pending sea-trials on the local trout pond). It had performed like a sea slug. I was fairly relaxed as I had already addressed many of his concerns and while the engineering could not be faulted, I wondered why he had not fixed the extra blades that I had left as a means of providing more buoyancy. (Among the many attractions of boats built like this was that they were modular, so that to increase the buoyancy all you might have to do was to double up the blades.) In contrast to the ‘experimental’ grey I preferred, it was also painted like a flower-box:

One of the differences with the profile for the car would be that the blades might need to be punctuated with arches for the wheels. Once in water wheels are obstructions and with amphibious cars they were left where they were, which compromised performance, or retracted in ways that were rarely elegant. Recently

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a New Zealand businessman had introduced the Aquada, and while he had solved the problem it had cost him around £18 million. I decided an alternative to this might be to lower retractable skis to provide both planing surfaces and an element of suspension that absorbed the shock of the waves. One day I walked around the original walls of Constantinople from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, and afterward took what claimed to be the world’s oldest tube train (actually a funicular and more like a rat up a drainpipe) to Pera in search of wooden manikins for my models. I was lucky enough to find male and female manikins and christened them the Flying Fokkers. Later I read in the paper how the last production car manufacturer in the UK ~ MG Rover ~ had collapsed after a deal with the Chinese fell through. Directors brought in to help had rescued nothing but their own pensions. It was frustrating to see money thrown at moribund industries while I was drowning in yellow foam. Rover’s most recent cars had been Japanese hatchbacks dressed up by marketing men, which works for a while but eventually devalues the brand. Portions of the car were now filled with foam of the sort you would use for filling gaps around windows (but try explaining that in Turkish ~ often I resorted to mime, like Marcel Marceau’s Man in Search of Expanding Foam). I disliked the stuff for it expanded entirely randomly and burst from the model like a triffid. Nonetheless on a whim I filled the bath with water and installed the car, only to find that the centre of gravity was too far forward and the front was submerged. Although I had installed both of the

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers Fokkers, to be light enough the car could obviously afford only a single seat. These developments were often punctuated by night-stops away from base, one of them near Izmir, where I hired a car one Sunday and drove to the accompaniment of Turkish pop music to the ancient city of Ephesus. It was once home to 200,000 although the estuary had silted up and it was now several kilometres inland. The thing all centres of civilisation needed to survive was water with which to drink, wash, cook, bathe and trade. It was therefore dedicated to Artemis, a mother goddess with numerous breasts, the number of which was actually increased by early Christians in an attempt to discredit the idea, which was a move that could so easily have backfired. I knew about the dependence of cities upon transport for I was from Liverpool, whose prosperity was pulled from under its feet when jets replaced ocean liners and cargo was redirected through Harwich. Monitoring developments among Personal Air Vehicles (as they were increasingly called) I saw how larger forms of transport were always displaced over shorter ranges by point-to-point travel. Although ocean liners and trains lost out to aeroplanes for travelling between (or over) continents, the car displaced everything else over shorter distances. The effects of flying cars might be equally significant, for instead of driving down a winding coastline that day to Ephesus, I could have cruised offshore. The biggest impact would be in connecting places where commuting was restricted to forms of public transport like ferries that create the illusion of distance. Water was an artificial gap the flying car could span, because

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every new bridge was a potential bottleneck besides a means of access. On some of my expeditions ~ like that to Termessos, the nearest Europe had to Machu Pichu ~ I would go regardless of the weather. The English like ragged weather on days like this because it reminds them of field trips. Each of the building blocks here was so large that you would be hard pushed to build the place even now given its remoteness. Like every other city from antiquity in Turkey it was abandoned after it was felled time and again by powerful earthquakes. I could imagine these twenty-ton blocks lying around on the floor and the ancient people telling themselves that ‘shit happened’. Up here though was an amphitheatre hanging off a cliff and a gymnasium where I liked to think that women exercised naked, or else bronzed warriors wrestled in leather instead of faded plimsolls and ‘Bobby Charlton’ shorts. I could almost sense these blessed people moving among their colonnaded streets. Had they been forewarned of impending disaster and escaped to the hills? Had their world ended in apocalypse? And had my hire car been broken into in the car park? Toward the end of April I heard that the modeller over the Bosporus was doing an exhibition at a marina nearby and I arranged to meet him to retrieve the goodies. Looking at the brochures a broad rule of thumb seemed to be that powerboats weighed around 100 kg per metre. Eventually I discovered my model blade boat, which was well fitted out and already had its engine ‘run in’. (To anyone who began driving after 1970 this term will be entirely meaningless.) Even the angle or ‘trim’ of its outboard motor could be adjusted

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers automatically, and although I thought I might test it in the UK, I decided to leave it in more capable hands. This was a decision I came to regret after never seeing the thing again. Afterward I perused the luxury motorboats outside, where one salesman suggested I would probably be more interested in second hand models. Cheeky bugger:

By the end of April in 2005 I had finished a second 1/6-scale car although the target date for launching a prototype was ever receding. Anyway, it was probably more important to do it right than do it first ~ there were counterclaims to the Wright Brothers’ precedent, but what swung the argument then was that they had been quickest to the customer. I had resigned from the Turkish airline as of June, but I got a call to say they wanted me to stick around for the summer in Brussels if possible, which would mean more time in the UK. This would undoubtedly be good for the project. Le Corbusier said that the problem of flight only had to be clearly stated for it to be solved inside ten years; so perhaps it would work a second time. There was certainly no rush to meet

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customer expectations. ‘The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.’ Confucius. I was convinced nonetheless that sales projections were required, and worked one out on the back of a sick-bag. It used the simple expedient of adding each month’s production to the number of the month, so January was Month 1 and would required one car, while February was Month 2 and needed two, along with one from January, and so forth. I originally made the mistake of doubling production each month, until I realised this soon covered the surface of the planet. Using the newer projection, at the end of the first year 78 cars per month were required and after five years we would be producing sixty a day. As I intended to franchise production around the world, it might look modest. Meanwhile I got on with rigging the Mark II. Thrust reversers would enable the car to run backwards, or assist the brakes, for a criticism of Rover’s turbine powered car of the 1950s was its complete absence of engine braking. If necessary ailerons could be fitted, and along the sides ‘plug-in’ wings might augment flight performance. I believed that flight free of the surface altogether was unnecessary given the burden of regulation, but this need not stop others from trying. I wanted to retain the purity of the car’s form and make of it an ‘aeroplane without wings’. Flying over the Sea of Marmara I could see that most of its coastline was under-populated, and yet over the water was one of the biggest urban centres in the world. If I could imagine living in a beach house and driving across the sea, couldn’t others? The best inventions were not so much products as visions of doing something differently.

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers I also managed to speak to the representative in Istanbul about extruded foams. Those I used in the models were produced as panels sixty centimetres wide, though they could be cut to any length required. (This required production to be shut down, however, which they only did for sales of three hundred cubic metres of foam, enough to build the Titanic.) They could increase thickness to ten centimetres, but that reduced consistency. All of it gave me pause for thought in the sauna afterward, where a family of Greeks were entertaining themselves during the Easter break. The Orthodox Greeks celebrated Easter later than everyone else, and perhaps in here they felt that suffering was involved. The father told me he was a gynaecologist and that he had spent a year in St Albans. I tried to think of the funniest thing I could say in reply, and settled for asking if he ever looked up any of his old girlfriends? Later on in Dalaman I stayed in the sort of motel you would find on the outskirts of any town, and appropriately at the time I was reading the Alan Partridge scripts about the DJ and archetypal loser from Norwich who spends six months in a ‘Travel Tavern’. Whether I could laugh after six months in the Radisson I was not sure. At breakfast I felt like the major in Fawlty Towers as one or other Turkish waiter asked: ‘Would Mister Hilton be having his waffles again today?’ The flying was beginning to get me down, as it always did toward the end of a contract; hours of grinding up and down Europe staring into space and wondering how I could possibly waste my life in this way. It always gave me time however to think objectively about design modifications. It was how your mum had said when you got stuck with your homework: take a break and go back to it later.

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After I flew all night on May 7th to Copenhagen, when the only compensation was a magnificent display of Northern Lights, I returned to London again, for I had to take control of my kingdom when I returned from exile like a Norman king. Firstly I visited Brett, who was characteristically unfazed by my replacing the boat with a car. From there it was on to Southampton, where I bought more Core-Cell. For the full-sized prototype I selected twenty millimetre panels that were not cheap, although a case of sixteen at least attracted a discount. I had calculated that the car would use eight, and it seemed a logical decision. I also signed for a DTI feasibility grant worth £10,000 that was actually supplied to investigate the boat, but anyone who has seen the TV series Yes Minister will readily appreciate that the best thing to do was to make the switch with a bureaucratic sleight of hand. If either were successful then nobody would notice anyway. Besides I was sceptical whether the study would do anything except line the pockets of the consultancy, though it might have proved a stepping-stone to greater funding for manufacture. In May it looked like Onur Air might unravel the way Vbird had in Germany. Uniquely in Turkey, the airline had survived independently for fifteen years, but now the Dutch chose to ban them at short notice. There was a lot of politics involved, because they carried most of the traffic between Holland and the resorts at low cost, while the Dutch had more bankrupt airlines and unemployed pilots than anyone. The Germans followed suite, because that was what they did, followed inevitably by the French. (The UK conducted their own ramp-checks and let them

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers continue.) I offered to negotiate, because I knew that commercial motives were often disguised in the silken suit of ‘safety’, and also that bureaucrats ran like sheep if you barked. During one evening in Antalya I swam in the bay while the sun set over the Taurus Mountains and the swallows swooped around above the waves, reminding me of how they had done the same when I swam in the sand pits around Laarbruch. Afterward I drafted an application for a competition in the Daily Telegraph for the best start-up: ‘Believe me gentlemen, one day the car will fly.’ Not the words of a pundit, but of Henry Ford, who did more than anyone during the last century to improve our mobility, and thus our social mobility. He made this possible by devising a means of assembly besides the car itself. In this century, only one company is building a flying car the way Ford would have done, from the ground up. The same company is launching an affordable product this year, the Model ‘T’ for today. The dreamer is Colin Hilton… and his dream is the CushionCar. Pompous, I thought, but pithy. I appended a picture of the latest model and victory was inevitable. Back in Istanbul, with most flying cancelled I had the leisure to establish a routine, with breakfast at eight-thirty (where I snaffled a petit pain for mid-morning), then back to the room where my shorts went on along with the radio, and the tools came out. Lunchtime was an excuse to go to the DIY, combining it with a visit to McDonalds. I might finish at six thirty and then spend

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an hour in the gym, before slumping in front of a twenty-year-old episode of Cheers with a glass of wine and a room-service kebab. It was a life of simple pleasures and much like that in Germany. I found however that toward the end of the day I would (a) be sick of the sight of flying cars and (b) have lost any problem-solving capacity. I was also sceptical about the thing ever leaving the ground, for when the motor was fitted the model felt positively leaden. I weighed the components: foam chassis 1200g (marvellous), airfoils 120g (v. good) fuel tank 65g and motor unit 1300g (must try harder). The motor weighed as much as the car, which was not a good thing, and I wondered whether a jet might have been a better choice after all. For flexible materials for the airfoils I was stuck until I found a workshop around the corner where an old man was making signs. I strolled in and looked around, for in Turkey nobody complained, and came away with corrugated PVC. A flight test on land was easiest to organise, and so I fitted castors. I wondered if the hotel ballroom might be hired for tethered flight tests, for I could probably sell this to the manager on its historical value alone. (By this time I had heard from the man over the water to say that he had tested the boat, and that it had broken up. I suspect it sank afterwards like the Lusitania, but Emirhan might simply have done a runner with the engine. Naval historians could only speculate.) You might think that with two failed prototypes under my belt I was deterred, though I was a little disappointed with the tests themselves. Both models had been fitted out to high standards, though in Ian’s case all I had was a verbal report and no hard data, and

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers in Emirhan’s case he shelved the task for months once he had the money, despite my repeated enquiries. The guy could sell bull shit for Asia Minor. Eventually most of the shortcomings were down to me, for inadequate focus on the requirements and a failure to manage the process. This is why investors are more interested in track records than ideas. There were other issues culminating at this time though, like studying the business case. I read a collection of essays by entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, who predicted as far back as 1983 that the cost of PCs was unlikely to drop, for each successive model became more capable. Just as intriguing was Ken Olsen’s prediction that nobody needed personal computers. The extent to which computer CEOs could put their foot in their mouths was amazing ~ IBM themselves once proclaimed that the world required only five computers. (Much of this was philosophy, for IBM stemmed from the corporate age of benevolent institutions and in this environment they appeared almost god-like in their powers, as did their computers, and who needed more than five gods? As however it was Ken Olsen who supplanted IBM mainframes with ‘minicomputers’ his gaffe was less forgivable. Although it was easy to kick a man when he was down, how could he not have seen that the process he initiated would not be taken further?) In the same way people used public transport only when they had to, if there was no alternative. There were people out there like me who enjoyed steam trains, but not as a means of commuting. We want the best products for communication, entertainment, travel and leisure, but all at an individual level. Bell saw

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the telephone as a device for broadcasting concerts. Wrong. For IBM the computer was a global calculator. Wrong. Now Hollywood felt that TV was undermining the entertainment business, and yet football and Formula One had become behemoths because they were beamed into billions of homes. And this was where I saw airliners going. I wanted people to replace pilots, who still carried the odour of privilege. Count Von Zeppelin was spurred on (apart from six million marks in public donations) by rejection among his military peers, who were deaf to suggestion. If we had cars that travelled over water or that flew, who would need cars, or boats or aeroplanes separately any more? Who needed separate computers, telephones, cameras, music and TV when they could be packaged together? It was like Edwin Land (who held more patents than anyone except Edison) had said: ‘…quite suddenly, a field will emerge conceptually so full blown in a creator’s mind that words can scarcely come from his mouth fast enough…’ Meanwhile the cost of the prototype at full scale was mounting astronomically (£2000 for foam panels alone) and there would be no opportunity for building another, so the model had to be got right. I was intrigued by how the car could be made with plastic and adhesives alone. I sought plastic solutions to everything, for it was light and cheap, and could be worked by ‘cold’ processes instead of rivets or welding. I included headlights on the models, as there are certain features that carry undue weight, including these. For evolutionary reasons the part of the brain that recognises eyes is hot-wired to the nervous system so that no active contemplation is required for a response.

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turkeY, APr 2005 Meet the FOkkers One of the towers at Bodrum Castle was named after a snake, for in all civilisations it represents sexuality, healing, death and reincarnation. The sight of a snake provokes an instinctive response even in the young, and the eyes themselves convey disproportionately powerful messages, for in predators they are the threat itself. I felt that headlights were the ‘eyes’ of the car. I realised now that I was the uncle that I never had, and I envied my nephews and nieces, whose own uncle was a suave gentleman who flew airliners in the Orient and built flying carpets too. However rather than test the model himself in Istanbul, Uncle Colin would leave the model car with a man in England, in the hope he would set it up for flying. He rarely learned from experience unless it slapped him in the face. Instead to culminate this phase I drafted another patent specification for the car, although I was not wholly convinced of its value except as a means to establish some ground rules. Being imitated was as much as any inventor could hope for and better altogether (as Oscar Wilde observed) than being ignored. Registering documents like this meant that people anywhere in the world could access the material online, and the information would be retained indefinitely. You could still look up what Whittle had felt was special about his engine, or the way that the Wright Brothers described building an aeroplane. It was also a good discipline in itself, and even my patent agent conceded that my latest effort was clearer than the previous; although she qualified this by saying that my parts list was inconsistent. Both patent agents and psychiatrists see problems others do not, and for either type the glass is more often half empty than half full.

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I always liked to think that at some point other people might join in. This should be the overriding motive behind inventing anything, for without participation ideas will eventually wither on the vine. It was becoming mission critical to power up some or other model sooner rather than later to see if it would take off, so as to get the PR moving and advance toward a full-scale prototype. Already the foam had arrived and I discussed with Brett over the phone how we might make up panel sandwiches. And Liverpool had once more won a historic Champions League victory, coming back from a 3-0 deficit to take the game to extra time in Istanbul. What must the manager have said at half time to surmount such odds? During my own finale in Istanbul I celebrated in my own inimitable style with a visit to the Church of St Saviour, which boasted an unparalleled collection of Byzantine mosaics. Never let it be said I do not know how to let myself go.

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 ~ PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM By the start of summer I had moved to Brussels, where the company based an aircraft. The fleet manager said that they loved me and wanted me to stay; surely not realising that English managers were not quite as effusive. It was nice to live in a genteel place like Brussels after the hurly-burly of Istanbul, and I promptly revisited the motor museum. Here at least, some turn-of-century cars had a level of sophistication that even I hoped to match, while some of the engines produced less power than those of my models. For decades cars only had brakes on the rear wheels, left over from the days of horse-drawn carriages. It was also interesting to see how cars evolved from both the technology and the prevailing style of each era. Thus coach-built bodies in the 1920s gave way to pressedsteel in the 1930s, and although wheels were still protected by fenders, they now extended down each side as ‘running boards’. It suited the requirements of the time, and gave Al Capone’s gangsters something to hang on to during drive-by shootings. He actually wrote to Henry Ford congratulating him on the suitability of his cars for his wayward pursuits. It seemed a long time before it occurred to anybody to make the car wide enough to include the wheelarches, something that also provided more shoulderwidth. It may have been a cultural prejudice, for when consumers feel new models do not look ‘right’ they vote with their wallets. We all remember cars that seemed inappropriate to begin with, which later proved the norm. I liked the Ford Mondeo, though they called

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it the ‘jelly-mould’. Before long, because of the demands of aerodynamics all cars looked the same anyway. Manufacturers take quantum leaps at their peril (the Edsel notoriously torpedoed the career of at least one Ford), as the numbers involved discourage adventurism. One of the few advantages that entrepreneurs wield is that with less at stake they can take more risk; although whether it extended to flying cars only time would tell. The car retained a chassis throughout the 1920s; typically a pair of steel beams supporting full-span axles and a coach-built body. After the bodywork became steel too the chassis was retained for a while longer. A feature of new technologies is that to begin with they tend to get used in the old way. After the introduction of pressed steel bodies, the cars of the 1940s gradually filled out. Style suffered a reversal during WWII, which did wonders for aeroplanes but nothing for cars (unless you enjoyed driving a Nazi half-track). The ration years of the 1950s featured cars that had escaped from fairground rides, and it was only at the close of the decade in America that the style revolution of the 1960s was ushered in. The museum here had a sublime ‘60 coupe by Raymond Lowey, apostle of the tailfin era. Faux-aerodynamics of course appeared in the 1930s to coincide with Art Deco, except then it was locomotives and the first airliners that provided the inspiration whereas later it was the jet fighters of the Korean War or rockets from the space program. Moving to the 1970s I recognised cars from my teenage years, most of them only missing Starsky and Hutch. In the subsequent decade the blandishments of mass-production raised the risk stakes higher, and I

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM was interested to see Audi’s Quattro coupe conceptualised in wood laminate as recently as 1991. (There was also a wooden mock-up of a Lancia sportssaloon from the 1960s that looked like a fishing boat in comparison. At least it went into production, while the Audi got only so far as to prove my point.) There is sometimes no substitute for models and it was one of these in clay that persuaded Volkswagen to run with Bentley’s best-selling roadster. Nonetheless it was hard for me to imagine that wooden mock-ups would survive into the new era of plastic body-mouldings and virtual-reality walkthroughs:

In the hotel at Brussels there was at least good broadband access and my laptop, phone and MP3 player were essential to living abroad. I began to view the car as a personal accessory that might eventually address different modes of transport. I realised too that I might omit the wheels from the craft initially and sell something that could nevertheless be adapted for road use later, for I wanted to reduce the number of design iterations. Oldsmobile was the first to massproduce cars, but he failed at first by spending on too

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many experimental vehicles; he settled on one design when fire took hold of his workshop and only the lightest could be saved. Being the simplest, it proved an astounding success. Before leaving for a break in Venice I had tried a jet ski for fifteen minutes on the Aegean, which I felt was justified on grounds of research. It took me several minutes to dare open the throttle, for it was like riding a super-bike down a farm track. It impressed upon me the absolute necessity to get above the waves as soon as possible for a smoother ride. I had first seen the gentle waters of Venice however twenty-five years earlier, when I had arrived by train (which was still the best way). Venetians were now outnumbered ten to one during the summer, and in any tourist town otherwise unremarkable features are often elevated to iconic status ~ like the mannequin pis in Brussels ~ that adorn every photo album. Our tour guide said the change she most regretted was the substitution of every other kind of shop for ones selling carnival masks. You can see mine in the hallway. What distinguishes our modern world is its devotion to leisure, which is nothing new, except that we have magnified its excesses and extended it to the masses. Berthed opposite St Marks Square was Octopus, owned by Paul Allen of Microsoft and the world’s largest motor yacht. As far as the gliterati were concerned this amounted to a papal visit. There were already several million millionaires in the world besides Allen and because I would not be able to afford a flying car it did not mean that nobody else would either, so that luxury brands like Porsche would always remain profitable.

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM I learned here too that Renaissance artists graduated from artwork to statues, and then architecture, where each of these different skills could be practised. In an amateurish way I had done this with my models, progressing from casual sketches to a familiarity with the material, and afterwards to the point where a structure could be assembled. Inevitably too I visited the Naval Museum, and found an original model of the hydrofoil; which so far as I could tell was an Italian invention. Looking at it I could not imagine why the idea had largely died out, though I guessed it was because conventional technology had caught up. If you do not need some special feature to accomplish the overall aims of a product, then it withers away like the wings of a Dodo. For example, many cars no longer need turbochargers, for when they were powerful enough the turbine became just another thing to break down. Still on a Venetian theme, back in England the artist Dale Chihuly had installed pieces of his glass artwork in Kew Gardens for the season. This was also a tenuous link to Istanbul, for Byzantines called Venice the ‘Daughter of Constantinople’. Much of ornate glassware stemmed from the Middle East via the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire, especially when it was split into two; the Vandals of the Rhine valuing glass only for its lager-containing properties. Although familiar with Chihuly’s work from the V & A, here I took the chance to purchase a piece. This was the first time I had patronised the arts since buying a painting from an artist in the flat below in Forest Hill; I had given him £75 pounds, which was nearly as great a sacrifice then as this £2000 was twenty-five years later. Chihuly was an inspiration: lavish with raw materials

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and prolific with results, and this was something I could learn about working with foam. He worked with groups to create a school of expertise, but also to satisfy the number of commissions he undertook. I did not suppose that he had personally made the piece I had bought (maybe just patted it with a wooden spatula), for he had not blown glass since losing an eye. (I never found out how this happened, but if he needed a glass replacement he would not have to look far.) He extended the boundaries on size, texture, colour and malleability, and I resolved to work even faster like him, and push my materials to the limit. Before returning to Istanbul I drove to Rye to see Ian and to collect the first of the models, the boat fitted with the electrical outboard. I sensed that he was reluctant to see it broken up after his painstaking work and despite dashed expectations. To an extent it had been spoiled for a ha’porth of tar, but Ian had obviously done his best. As time went on I was convinced the way to succeed was with simple designs using the cheapest materials. The car was originally viewed as something for the aristocracy, yet Olds and Ford had overturned the notion. Fifteen million Model ‘T’s were sold, a figure only exceeded much later by the Beetle, which was another car for the masses. Transport like everything else was a ‘numbers game’ and from here on in everything I built need only be good enough for demonstration purposes. I was kicking myself for buying material in advance, and while the supplier did not deliver the foam until the cash was banked, every other client of his was probably three-months due; I would therefore want some serious ass-kissing once sales escalated. It convinced me though of the potential for material substitution for the techniques I had formulated.

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM ‘Ideation’ was the thing though. In places like China wages were around $100 per month, so the sensible thing was to provide design, sales and marketing in Europe and leave manufacturing and logistics to the developing world. You may think they would find the suggestion demeaning (especially as they were more intelligent), but for developing economies this was a foot in the door. I was relaxed about divulging design ‘secrets’ (and there were not many anyway) for I was confident that nobody could direct the venture quite as well as I could myself. Progress requires personal chemistry, and if I were an investor (which in a way I was), I too would want Hilton at the helm. In Brussels meanwhile I first had to do a simulator check. There was nothing like one of these to rattle your cage and I realised I had done no preparation at all, so that I went in armed only with experience. Sometimes pilots would refuse to enter the simulator at short notice, so that trainers would have to point out that the simulator was supposed to be practise for the real thing, and not the other way around. Every pilot works up a sweat in this environment, with the workload divided between trying to remember what must be done (and in what order), besides the physical dexterity required and the raised level of awareness. What made things worse at forty-six was needing reading glasses in low light, so that during emergency approaches I was putting them on at regular intervals to scrutinise the approach plate, or taking them off to guide us toward the runway. Afterward I foolishly accepted a lift from the examiner, who had a kit car based on the Lotus that Colin Chapman had designed thirty years previously.

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It gave anything a run for its money up to 60 mph and stuck to the road like glue, although its construction was rudimentary. If people were prepared to sacrifice comfort to experience such thrills, would they not do the same for a car that flew? I was convinced that they would. Around this time I was reading Setright’s social history of the car and frankly it daunted me, seeing the sheer complexity of components like steering and suspension. The thing to do when climbing mountains however is to look at your feet. Modern cars were designed for two hundred thousand miles or more, whereas I was merely trying to prove a point. It was during this bat-out-of-hell ride on a balmy evening in Brussels though that I realised I needed to find an institution that could provide workshop facilities, and wondered whether the motor museum might offer practical support. I later got wind of a suite next door to my room in the hotel, for an extra €50 per night. It had a three-piece suite, a separate bathroom and ample space for a workbench. It was beginning to have the air of the cosmopolitan: Manchester, Düsseldorf, Istanbul and Brussels. I could see how soldiers enjoyed campaigns, and endless packing and shipping or setting up quarters. Driving back I had spotted the Tram Museum and mentally pigeonholed it for a visit after calling at the motor museum to speak to the director. I intended to suggest that I use a portion of his floor-space to mount a ‘history in the making’ installation that would provide somewhere to build the car. They were not overwhelmed by visitors anyway, for kids probably found computer games more fun than wandering around listening to old men discuss double­

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM declutching. But I knew from experience that any mention of flying cars was a sure-fire winner with anyone under twenty-five… that and sex, anyway. Soon after as well I took the train to Antwerp to visit Panamarenko’s workshop, eschewing the attractions of the zoological gardens. The place looked closed, and without any response from the interphone the door opened into a blackened parlour containing only a solar-powered sports car ~ all in all it was my kind of entrance-hall. A female acolyte (I could have used some of these myself) welcomed me from a reception desk in the next room, and I made a quick circuit of the exhibits. It was largely empty space, however, for the artist had married and decamped to Ostend. He was beyond working for a living, having like Damien Hirst only to break wind to send the critics into raptures. It is precisely at the point that investors take these people seriously that they cease to do so themselves. Upon my return, I discovered that the hotel manager had already decided that I should have the suite, so there I was in well-appointed living space within spitting distance of the Grand Place. It would have suited my youthful ambitions to a tee, living on the continent and learning a language, though now it had a sort of ‘well you’re stuck here now so you might as well enjoy it’ feel to it. Besides, people expected their entrepreneurs to decamp to exotic places. I subsequently found a fibreglass outlet nearby too, whose proprietor had retired as a chemist and now ran the shop with his brother. I called them The Chemical Brothers. And it got better. At the end of June I caught the metro to the motor museum for an

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appointment that I wish I had made later than nine o’clock. Outside the director’s office was the best collection of pedal cars I had seen. ‘They would’ the director told me, ‘suit Kylie Minogue.’ During the meeting Claude said that the museum was state property and that construction was disallowed though the basement had a workshop. He did however offer me a display area devoted to the ‘Car of Tomorrow’ for four months, which would be the first retrospective of Hilton’s work on the continent. I was becoming alarmed at how the project was fanning out in different directions despite its flimsy foundation, and galvanised by this fear I returned to set up my trestle table. At the Tram Museum I had a croque monsieur so that I could spill mayonnaise down my khaki trousers, and then bought the ‘train-spotter’ ticket that included a ride on a vintage tram. Here I joined several other balding men in stained khaki, so that together we looked like a themed float in Rio. In the museum itself I particularly liked a stripped down bus chassis from the 1970s, when there was a revolutionary relocation of the engine from the front to behind the rear axle, which for spotters was as momentous as Galileo’s heresy. Nonetheless I noticed that the way the wheels were steered had not changed since the first cars were put together almost a century before. For my own vehicle, reducing the overall material would also reduce its weight, a virtuous circle in aircraft design for it meant that a smaller engine could be used that consumed less fuel, so that less could be carried. The design of aircraft suffers no fools. Weight and shape barely matter to cars, but with aircraft it means the difference between them working or not. Maybe I

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM ought to look at lighter models that were easier to test, or even simple gliders? I considered every conceivable way of testing a glider: fixing it to the car, launching it down a slope, catapulting it with bungee chords, fitting it with rockets and throwing it from the sixth floor of the hotel … and on a whim I found it was possible to put one together from a page of A4 paper, a form of origami that produced a miniature just 12 cm long; dropped from the ceiling of my room it executed perfect touchdowns time and again. It showed promising lateral stability (it did not roll over) and evidently the ‘closed biplane’ arrangement worked. Aircraft that glide are easily adapted to powered flight, and it was ironic that after a fruitless quest for a powered model that I had circumvented the problem in ten minutes with only a sheet of paper and a stapler. A sense of scale is provided in the picture by a One Euro coin, so enjoy it while it lasts:

What we invent though is limited to what we can build. It was important at this juncture that I produced not just a prototype but also something that might be taken up and then improved. It was also important to draw a line under each phase in order to preserve my sanity.

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Maybe I could drive the prototype to Brussels for the exhibition, flying it across the English Channel and recreating the early years of motoring, with their heady cocktail of danger and expectation? Meanwhile I was affected by events in the world beyond Planet Hilton, for in the space of twenty-four hours London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and was bombed by fundamentalists. The Turks I worked with, also Muslims, all offered condolences. The enabling media however for this new dispersed form of terrorism were transport and communications. The travel writer Laurens Van der Post wrote how cars and aircraft were destroying global diversity ~ now they were destroying the world. In the middle of July I returned to the UK to chase up various aspects connected with the project, but once there I could not be bothered. The whole thing was becoming a chore with no end in sight, and life was passing by. Instead we went on a picnic to Hyde Farm, a showpiece of the Royal Horticultural Society. The weather was sublime, and in these conditions there was nowhere I would rather be, nor anything I would rather be doing. Invention treads a fine line between hope and absurdity, and sound ideas often lapse into oblivion. How many technologies were lost to humankind in this way? On the train back to Brussels I realised I could make wing-sections from foam panels by building up three-dimensional shapes from templates stacked together; in the way that slices of bacon could be used to recreate a leg of ham. I had seen the same technique exhibited at a furniture exhibition ~ when the Arts and Crafts movement struggled to incorporate mass production, there were

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM many experiments in applying new methods to traditional materials like wood. The Scandinavians discovered that by building up blocks of wood from fine sections, they could steam them and bend them into all sorts of shapes. And unlike blocks of sawn timber that warped or cracked (so that Tudor boat-builders aged their oak for centuries), laminates did neither. I did wrestle with how to cut sections of foam for this purpose, and the obvious tool seemed to be a laser. Turning to ‘coupe’ in the telephone directory turned up any number of gay hair salons but no laser-cutters, and so I looked up ‘laser’ instead. This produced a cornucopia of companies along with a sprinkling of water-cutters, which had no page of their own and had moved in with their illustrious cousins. Instead of labouring with a hacksaw, I could simply drop off a stack of foam panels and collect any number of pastrycut shapes afterward, in order to assemble the lightest and most curvaceous cars imaginable. While pondering these techniques I attended a service on Sunday morning at the cathedral opposite. The Flemish woodcutters were among the best, and their pulpit here was spectacular. Accompanied by a Bach quartet from Regensburg, the occasion was suitably uplifting, although it was conducted in Flemish and French. Holy water was sprinkled on the heads of the congregation with what looked like a toilet brush, and the priest chastised the congregation for applauding the quartet in a display of ebullience that Jesus would probably have appreciated. Back at the museum, Marvia (who marketed the space) and Claude accompanied me around the summer exhibition on transport in Belgium, in which SABENA loomed large despite never making profits.

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The area reserved for my own expo was adequate for several vehicles and I would have no choice other than to build a full-blown mock-up, which I found depressing (although I was reminded how I wandered around Manchester City Art Gallery and considered how marvellous such an opportunity might be. They do say be careful that your dreams do not come true). Over the next two days I drafted a text for the murals that adequately summarised the aims of my project: NASA aims to use aluminium body shells already used in cars, but their ‘personal transport’ looks more like an aeroplane: “We don’t do flying cars.” Colin’s cars use composites instead, and are more like those in sci-fi movies. They work well on roads, with an added flight capability: “I do flying cars.” Thousands of hours in control of Boeing and Airbus jetliners helps, while he has the benefit of experience ~ Ferrari and Benz were the same age when they started out in business. His Cushion Car is designed to skim the surface in low-level flight. Technically it could fly like an aeroplane, but there are too many reasons not to. Any flying machine the size of a car makes a poor glider. Conventional aeroplanes glide a great distance if their engines fail, but the Cushion Car comes down steep as the Space Shuttle. In these circumstances you would have to be very experienced or very brave. The eventual solution is more than one engine, though people generally do not like flying no matter how safe. Offering them a chance to realise their nightmares is not an ideal sales strategy, so the solution instead might be to develop a market for skimming open spaces like water. The Cushion Car is designed as an ‘air cushion vehicle’ that benefits from the lift a piece of paper uses when it floats across a table. Fast catamarans

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BeLGIuM JuN 2005 PANAMAreNkO’s PILGrIM nowadays often form an aerodynamic surface so that at speed they are almost flying over the waves. With a little help, this flight can be taken into the air, where the secret of success is control. Sir Clive Sinclair said about the Wright Brothers: “They were not the first to fly ~ they were the first not to crash.” None of this is especially easy, but neither is it altogether complicated. The architect Le Corbusier summed up flight like this: “Once the problems had been stated in simple terms, aeroplanes were developed in a decade”. The modern car however is an evolution of the horse-drawn carriage, and was never particularly troubled by considerations like weight or aerodynamics. Nowadays though half the team behind every F1 car is made up of aerodynamics engineers. Construction uses the sort of foam-sandwich composites that Colin developed for high-speed boats. Powered models proved to be effective and their success was transferred to the car. Foam panels are used as building blocks: each ‘fender’ down the side supports the wheels while the forward ‘wing’ supports a cockpit and the stabiliser supports the engine. Different fans or propellers can be used. In operation the car can drive on roads or fly across desert, snow or water in the ‘surface effect’. It can sail like a powerboat, but normally takes off from the beach. “New forms of transport begin as ideals like in comic-books, but like us they have to adapt to reality.” says Colin. He imagines that cars will ‘translate’ from the road into inter-city flight whenever traffic and weather permit, so flying cars have to look like any other. Nor will people buy them unless they are a bit special. “Is it a boat, is it a car, or is it a ‘plane? You tell me …”

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When I revamped the side profile of the car, I found that the silhouette of the rear quarter mirrored that at the front, so that they could be cut from the same halfpanel of foam. This meant the sides of the car could be made from three panels instead of four, and the significance of this discovery to subsequent developments (as you will see) cannot be overestimated. The 175th anniversary of Belgium on July 21st in 2005 celebrated independence from the Netherlands, and if it was a time of reflection for the nation, it was also an uncertain period for myself. In retrospect I had mismanaged the project, and a key failure had been in testing the models. I had been too lazy to learn do this myself, and failed to supervise others. Now as I scaled up the profile of the car on the floor of my hotel room, I realised how straightforward building full-size versions could be. The problem with most inventors is that they do not identify what they want from the enterprise at the beginning, whether the challenge, recognition, money, or satisfaction? For me, creating a product from the car ~ or the boat ~ was challenging enough.

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 ~ LIvING It LArGe At the end of July the project was in a state of flux. When I got down to the nitty-gritty, it looked like it would be defeated like other hybrids and the more it was reduced to a functional minimum, the less it looked like a car. History showed that whatever looked like a car was usually too heavy to fly. I knew that my car had only to fly in ground effect, but would anyone want a car anyway that was incapable of free flight? Cars like the ‘Aquada’ were already effective on water. And as this was not ‘art for art’s sake’ frankly I begrudged exhibiting something in which I had lost faith myself when I could be outside enjoying the summer. I relished the idea of building and selling something I had conceived myself and this prospect was retreating. To cheer myself up on a wet Sunday morning I went to see Victor Horta’s first commission: an Art Nouveau town-house over five floors. The Belgian architect was disillusioned at the end of his life by the number of his buildings that were being demolished. How many creative objects are ever appreciated by more than a few of us anyway? I might as well go for a quick fix, and success that I could enjoy sooner rather than later. If at the same time it could be a platform to bring some of my far-flung ideas closer to conception, then so much the better. So I turned back to the model that appeared to have the firmest chance of success, the Blade Boat from the Bosporus. I had abandoned any patents for the boat except for the way that the blades were constructed (although eventually I would abandon this too). This

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seemed like a good opportunity to re-develop the original outline. I liked the profile of the boat for it was functionally cleaner than the car and used less foam. What really changed around this time (which was something that the car had contributed to in my endless quest to reduce its panels) was the way the panels formed a practical shape. I had already redrafted the ‘rawhide’ deck and cut it out to a pattern with a mirror image, and later I found a way of cutting the outline of each blade from a single panel. It meant that the entire boat could be made from only two templates, and four panel sandwiches. I had therefore cut the panel-count in half compared to the car, so that there was an impressive saving in both weight and cost. I could hardly wait to get up next day and cut out new profiles to reassure myself that it could be done. The moment I did so it was clear I had the foundation of a both a capable boat and a commercial prospect. The only fly in the ointment was whether it constituted a novel idea requiring a separate patent; but good problems were preferable to bad. I had already decided that I had to go down the aero-engine route for several reasons, the first of which was product differentiation, for it had to be more than a fast boat. Another was practicality, because propellers for aircraft were so much more efficient at high speed. Finally if it was to be a developmental platform for a platform that flew, then it could not depend upon water for propulsion. The diameter of a propeller though was a problem, for I could not guarantee it would remain clear of the waterline until the craft was hydroplaning. To allow for this, I looked at the idea of a pivoting deck again, so that the propeller could be raised. These

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 LIvING It LArGe contemplations sometimes took hours on end ~ at the beginning of the last century one of the avant-garde said that if you contemplated any object for long enough, it appeared either fantastic or absurd. It is certainly true of many inventions prior to the point when people start buying. I constantly had to remind myself that if the performance exceeded anything else then that would be all that mattered in the end. It was about results. When I took a few days out in Istanbul again, it was here I understood that the most satisfying journeys I had made had always been inside my head, or inside the thoughts of others through their books, and that what most made me happy was not moving around constantly but sticking around and getting on with it. I had to admit that I had already achieved a great deal so far, no matter how often I denied myself the luxury of congratulation. I had turned a few panels of foam into a boat that looked assured, no matter what obstacles lay between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Furthermore it was a path toward a class of vehicles ~ those skimming above the sea ~ that as yet did not exist. Over the years I had had any number of ideas, but so often they revolved around the yearning to fly above the wave tops on a magic carpet.

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On the 5th of August I decided that the blade produced from a stock panel was a novel idea that warranted protecting. I made only a passing reference to the deck, which was not nearly as coherent. In view of the fact that this outline could be peddled over the net at zero cost, it was the most important specification I have filed, and as good as any to culminate a career as inventor. At the time I was reading a piece on Seneca, the Roman philosopher from Spain whose life was spent in and out of exile. What he had to say about the vanity of ambition struck a chord, and more than ever now I was grasping for the near-at-hand that offered some kind of reward that I could build on. Interestingly, the philosopher managed to accrue a fortune equivalent to three million pounds by extorting interest from ancient Britons ~ and had we all taken his advice on contemplation, we would still be walking around in sandals. And I never had the legs for a toga. A day or two after filing the specification I made up blades and decking at 1/5th scale, or 0.90 metres. Although I had intended to make the deck from panels laid span-wise across the boat, it did not look quite right. Using one lengthways made the boat decidedly narrow, but was sufficient to prove a point. The ‘perfect width’ would have been 1.80 metres, which required a panel-and-a-half joined lengthways. I was unsure that the extra width was necessary, because if you looked at water-skiers, although they were top-heavy they moved on a very narrow track. To resolve the issue I lined the blades up on the floor and lived with them for a day or two. When I was satisfied with this process I decided that a boat of this kind would make a more practical

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 LIvING It LArGe mock-up to exhibit in Brussels than any other, and while it was not a car I could still link it to a half dozen models among which were many with wheels. Retrieving the Workmate from my car in the basement, I decided to join the deck and blades of the boat with the sort of joint more normally associated with wooden furniture. They made a snug fit and when it came to it the boat was as strong as a Victorian chest. It meant that the deck was even narrower than a standard panel (1.22 m) because I had sacrificed material to these joints, but because length was emphasised over width, it gave the impression of great speed even out of the water. Locating the deck was guesswork, but I had to start somewhere. I calculated that the craft would weigh about 55 kg, lighter than either driver or engine. As these items of payload were as heavy again as the boat, I would load the model (which weighed 0.75 kg) with a kilo either end to see how it floated. While running a bath, I bought two briquettes of juice from the shop around the corner, and with the model in the water I pencilled in the waterlines. Altogether the results were satisfactory ~ the water kissed the trailing edge of the deck and continued to do so in all of the later models. Later I phoned Milton Keynes where someone called Dan had explained to me what computer numerically controlled (CNC) cutting was about. I wondered whether their ‘routers’ could cut foam sandwiches around six inches thick, though he began by dispelling a few notions. Lasers were out of the question, as they would produce noxious fumes. Instead routers were mechanical tools like a drill bit, except that they moved sideways. They were best known for shaping kitchen work surfaces. As Dan

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wondered aloud whether cutting this depth of foam required a cutting tool to be made specially, when I heard the phrase ‘made specially’ I felt my wallet freeze over. Ten centimetres of foam or less would be no problem, another factor that came to influence the design. I now had to revisit Claude at the motor museum to break him the news that what I was about to display was no longer a car, but that for all intents and purposes it could be considered a boat. He took this surprisingly well, for I had sold him the idea on the basis that (a) I was the only known artist in foam panelling and (b) this was a way to fast track any form of transport. Upon my return to the hotel I revised the text for six displays, which each included a ‘montage’ featuring one of my models from storage. (After I prepared these on the floor of my hotel room I returned to find they were stuck fast, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign saw extended use on the doorknob while I worked with a scraper and white spirit to extricate them from the parquet.)

In the ensuing weeks, the logistics of getting foam back and forth across the English Channel was beginning to take its toll. While in England at the end of August

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 LIvING It LArGe I went to St Albans with the company secretary to reactivate the company account and acknowledge our new trading status, which was to coincide with that tax year. I was consolidating hard-won gains, and felt more of a sense of import filling out the application for a bank account second time around. By the end of August I had completed the montages for the exhibition, which described the half dozen phases through which the product had evolved. There was a ‘conceptual’ phase (1) in Cheshire followed by tentative experiments in Hatfield and Southampton, and in Germany (2) I learned how to put the blades together. Then we returned to England (3) to produce the first model blade boat, and afterward to Istanbul (4) where it was tested. Then the project decamped to Brussels (5) where the design was finalised after a foray into flying cars. With the models immortalised for posterity it was time to move on, and with the mockup complete I could assemble another (6) for testing in England in the last phase. Put like that it sounded easy. Although I brought panels of polyurethane foam (the filling in my ‘sandwiches’) from England, I found it easier to drive to Amsterdam for supplies of CoreCell. The outlet was in a part of Amsterdam that I had admired on the way in from Heathrow, an expanse of water to the east that burgeoned with modern apartments with access to this amenity. Being Holland, there was also a hippy commune, although I was told that it was unlikely to withstand the rising tide of the developers’ greed. Once the material arrived on the roof of the Peugeot at Autoworld in Brussels, it could be assembled in the basement garage. This proved a necessity in view of the fact I had opted for polyester

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resins that produced noxious fumes, which even from this remote source spread around the building. (On occasions when I had used these resins in the past, people had literally taken the day off sick.) The garage opened onto the street and served as a loading bay, from whence cars could be raised in a capacious elevator to the floors above. It meant that I was competing for ‘elevator time’ with, for instance, a group of mineralogists organising a weekend bringand-buy. That I had once studied geology hardly impressed them. Putting the boat together proved more amenable and I imagined with another pair of hands that it could be produced in a single day; a fact I might exploit at trade fairs. Each part was easily manhandled, but the finished article required a helping hand to carry it and this was generally Abdul, the museum technician. With the display lighting arranged to my satisfaction, montages in place and the boat centre-stage on a red carpet purloined from elsewhere, the display looked formidable. For a ‘capping out’ ceremony I glued a visitor book to a lectern at the entrance, and was soon afterward persuaded by the director to address a group of British travel agents; there were even audible gasps as I explained how each of the blades was derived from a single panel. The exhibition was complete by the end of September, and using the opportunity to assemble a prototype had been an invaluable lesson in how to produce the next. (I also learned that when presenting products to the public, you could not keep them simple enough.) The day I finished my ‘retrospective’, the conceptual artist Panamarenko opened his collection of fantastic forms of transport

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 LIvING It LArGe nearby, which ran for the same period. I no longer needed the old fart’s ideas now I had some of my own. Returning to the museum to include Dutch and French translations (provided by different departments at the hotel) I was heartened by the entries in the visitor book. From places as far apart as Korea or Argentina, the majority were in languages I did not understand, but I took the smiling faces that people had drawn as encouragement.

My stay in Brussels was to extend into October and during this time I returned to the UK and assisted Brett with marking up and cutting panels for the first ‘working’ prototype. I returned with more foam for modelling, which attracted the attention of Customs staff at Dover, for it was like exporting coals to Newcastle. On one of these occasions I had a stack a foot high on the roof that got me a carriage of my own on the shuttle that was normally used by trucks. Back in the hotel I began building the largest model thus far, which at 1/3rd scale it was as tall as me when stood on its tail (and at eighteen inches rather wider, or so I liked to think). At this stage I was unsure whether the working model or the larger prototype

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would be ready first; though there were valuable lessons to be drawn from either. As the project proceeded I was inclined to believe that no such effort was entirely wasted; the exhibition had been worthwhile if only to produce a single image that I could append to emails. An example of the power of this PR was that now when I contacted a firm about an engine, the owner replied himself offering a 20% discount. It was toward the end of October that I began the model and pinned its parts together with cocktail sticks. This was a method I borrowed from the fullscale mock-up, on which we had used kebab skewers, and I liked the idea that the cocktail sticks effectively modelled the skewers. Reclining on the sofa thereafter I was thrilled to see that I had lain down the keel, as it were, on the same day as the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar. In the meantime I had struggled for months with a suitable trademark, and I spent two whole days drafting possibilities or wasting money on domain names. One was ‘panelplane.com’, a name toyed with often for it summarised the construction technique. I drew up a logo like IKEA’s in the hope people would make the connection between flat-pack furniture and flat-pack boats, but in the end it occurred to me in the Botanical Gardens that the most recognisable thing about the boat was the profile itself, over which I had laboured for so long. It was functionally perfect, and seemed perfect too for a trademark. It was entirely memorable and could instantly be associated with the product, which was as much as you could ask of it. Among other advantages it seemed impervious to challenge during examination and did not need the word

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BeLGIuM, AuG 2005 LIvING It LArGe ‘cushioncraft’ appended to it. This was an advantage, for the name was hardly memorable even among native speakers in England, where it was frequently confused with hand-stitched cushion covers. I spent a day drafting the application, with hours of cutting, pasting, colouring, scanning and photocopying. Applications for trademarks had to be reduced to dimensions of 8 x 8 cm for publishing, which added the sort of challenge that a Swiss watchmaker might enjoy: In producing this template I used a symmetrical pattern, marking the prow of the blade centrally so that the portions to side (which made the rear half of the profile) were mirror images, where previously they were shaped differently. The newer pattern was suited to panels precisely 1200 mm wide, though most were what carpenters called ‘bastard’ sizes, a phrase I often used to describe suppliers on the day. In future we would have to cut the panels to these dimensions first. Then I left for the seaside, driving to Ostend where I took a tram via Zeebrugge to Knokke-Heist, which the Belgians led me to believe was delightful. I last drove along the coast twenty-five years earlier on a motorbike, and then I recalled it was an unrelenting procession of concrete apartment blocks. It still was. There was compensation in knowing England was over the water and more from the Amandine at Ostend, which was a deep-sea trawler that had been converted here into a museum. It was a suitable testimony to its crew and could be explored from every angle; I was so impressed by the giant rocker arms on its 500 hp diesel engine that I took a picture of them. I wanted to go to sea when I left school, and had no idea how I ended

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up working either in offices or flight decks instead. As I sat on the bridge and gazed up the high street with an eye on my echo sounder, I had to wonder what might have been. Near the end of October I prepared to leave Brussels, some two years after first entertaining the idea of building a surface-skimmer. The weather was uncharacteristically mild, with people still eating outdoors, and having seen all points West including Ypres, on my remaining day off I went to see the colours in the Ardennes. Before I left I bought a 1/3rd scale mannequin for the largest of my models, and given the choice between scale heights of 5’ 2” and 5’10” I had gone for the George Clooney version. This was huge in comparison to those I was more used to and returning to my empty room, I positively jumped when I saw it sitting on the window-ledge. Always pack those mannequins first.

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex At the end of October I returned with the same airline to Istanbul, but travelled to the UK in November for interviews, using the opportunity to purchase a micro­ light engine. One of the interviews was in Bournemouth, where I stayed with my wife on the sea front. We walked alternately east toward Hengistbury Head and west to Poole Harbour, where we paused at The Haven Hotel, which was famous for Marconi’s experiments in wireless telegraphy. Seeing the sea becalmed beneath cloudless skies only served to increase my frustration that my flying boat was not yet on water; though I drew encouragement from knowing that on days like these, even in winter, the scope for such craft was unlimited. Back in Istanbul all traces of greenery were being removed outside of the hotel to provide ten lanes of congested traffic in place of six, although even in the 1960s the town was still acclaimed as a Garden of Eden. I soon adjusted again to leaving for work in darkness to the strains of a muezzin, although I declined the opportunity to extend my work permit, for by the New Year I would have flown for a thousand hours in Turkey. By the middle of November I had constructed a new model here and reached the point where I could fit it with the 15cc fan engine that I had recovered from Northampton, which now had a simple propeller instead. At this point I reprised the problems aircraft designers were confronted with during the war, when the problem with fighter planes was that as propellers grew larger, the airframe had to be raised higher on

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longer undercarriage legs. The Spitfire was ill adapted to aircraft carriers because to land on these you had to drop in hard, and the Spitfire had the undercarriage of a ballerina. The slimmer jet engine solved the problem at a stroke, so that undercarriage legs could be shortened again; a few designs discarded wheels altogether, until somebody pointed out that an aircraft without them was like a nudist at a fashion show. What all of this meant for my own modest efforts was wondering where exactly to mount the engine. Even the model had a propeller that was one foot in diameter, and I took the decision in the end to raise its axis to the level of the stabiliser surface at the rear. It was most effective here for adjusting the ‘trim’ of the craft noseup or nose-down, and placing the motor here helped to lower the nose toward the water under acceleration. (Water screws have the opposite effect, and sudden acceleration can be enough to provoke a somersault.) With an engine and propeller fitted, it began to feel like I was moving from any number of structural models to the point at which some kind of dynamism was injected. Until now it had been an architectural exercise, whereas now a play of forces was coming into effect. The intricacy of the miniature piston-engine was enchanting, and I mounted it on four threaded rods, redolent of Victorian installations with cast-iron columns. Between times the latest draft of the patent specification arrived describing the flying boat, entitled ‘Production of a Float, and of a Hull of a Catamaran’. I felt the description was unduly self-effacing, but it was better with patent documents not to go singing from the rooftops. We were now pursuing patents relating to the production of blades, along with their

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex use in either a hybrid car or a flying boat. The latest related to how the pieces could be cut from a standard panel of foam and there was no guarantee that examiners would find the idea novel. Smaller model aircraft were made of parts pressed from foam, though as my patent agent pointed out, nobody had been stupid enough to try it at full scale. Everything hung upon seeing a prototype fly, and I was reading a book about how the Lockheed ‘Skunk Works’ forged any number of ground-breaking aircraft designs. Even prototypes such as the ‘stealth’ fighter (which ironically drew upon Russian research into radar wave propagation) were hand-built from stock parts, and the success of its inaugural flight was far from assured; an early version of their fastest jet (the SR-71) had been lost on take-off. Even in the 1970s, when military prototypes cost a thousand dollars per pound weight, aircraft were still modelled extensively in wood, and sometimes to test aspects of aerodynamic behaviour these were fired across the hangar by slingshot. This was often because of a need for secrecy, whereas in my case it was a lack of cash. I was also interested to read how the first F-117s the airframes were stood on end for assembly, for the shape of my flying boat made this a practical contingency that I often used as well. It was November 25 in 2005 when I decided to leave Istanbul before Christmas, and I didn’t suppose I would ever do quite so much flying again. I decided to postpone testing the model until returning to England, and used my free time instead to visit places like the Plastics and Rubber expo, where I hoped to find a vast array of expanded foam. It was not what I

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expected and the first hall was devoted to injection moulding machines, almost all of them from China. As everything was made of plastic by this time, what I was saw here were powerhouses of twenty-first century production and the noise and activity recreated that of a steam-driven cotton mill from two centuries earlier. The difference was that whereas England was then the engine driving world commerce, now it was labelled ‘Made in Taiwan’. In the UK we could no longer make machine tools for toffee. Okay, maybe just for toffee… Next door the hall contained machines for printing on plastic bags, and most of these were from Italy. More impressive was the way that polythene bags were made, by a process that would not have looked amiss in a Wallace and Gromit cartoon. Granulated polythene was poured into a hopper at one end and was cooked until it became plastic, after which it was extruded at high pressure through a ring so that it formed a hollow vertical tube that was inflated like a giant condom. It was no wonder that there were no women here. As this flowed inexorably toward the ceiling it was cooled and stamped into bag shapes before being rolled on a giant reel attended by hordes of small yellow men. The exhibition though was really for heavy metal guys, whose sexual urges were probably subsumed in these machines with pneumatic rams that spurted hot plastic into confined spaces to create a whole population of Tupperware lids. There was a section for rubberproduction fetishists, although expanded foams appeared to be a minority interest. I was told I should have been at the packaging show a month earlier, which showed what an unusual angle I was coming from to build boats.

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex At the beginning of December I was getting that ‘endof-term’ feeling and lacked the enthusiasm to test the model I had by then largely completed. During a few days in Antalya the sky was relentlessly blue, and the azure sea lapped at the foot of the hotel’s private shore. The frustration I felt in gazing across this expanse while not being able to do anything to advance my ambitions was beginning to get to me. Once I returned to Hatfield I hoped to be able to tie the model to fishing line and run it around a pole on the lake in Stanborough Park. My father came home one Christmas with a model cabin cruiser around four feet long, probably as much for his own amusement as ours. On Sunday afternoons we would set it loose in Calderstones Park, where it proved to be both fast and entirely uncontrollable. One of us would be at the far side of the lake, guessing at the target, though sometimes the boat would veer off elsewhere. Like many toys though the excitement was as much in the expectation than in the use, and the docile electrical engine that was purchased as a replacement for its wayward diesel engine remained in its box for years. And that was enough of Turkey until Christmas Day. I wistfully turned over the propeller a few times on the model intended for testing. The powerful compression and expectant sucking and popping of exhaust and induction strokes took me back to endless weekends at school when dismantling motorbikes had been as much fun as riding them. And there was my last flight, something that was always memorable as each different job drew to its close. At Heathrow it had been returning from Dublin, and at Vbird the short trip from Munich to Laarbruch. And like each of these

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flights that had taken place in the evening, this time I left as the sun was setting over the Sea of Maramara. Fighting fierce headwinds between Ankara and Paris, our elapsed time was over four hours; and yet returning to Istanbul took only two and a half, our speed approaching six hundred knots. At nearly seven hundred mph, whole nations unwound beneath our wings like scrolls on a pianola. After parking at midnight I turned to my co-pilot Ferhad, and told him, like Shane as he strolled out of town: ‘My work here is done …’

Back in the UK I drove down to Southampton to assist with assembling the prototype and to pick up more foam, for one more working model had to be built to replace the one left in Istanbul. Before beginning the prototype I revised the form that the centre-section took and reverted to the original, as it appeared on the boat I first registered as a design. It had the advantage of securing the blades perpendicular to each other while providing accommodation for the driver. As it looked like a coffin, I told Brett I wished to be buried in it in the event of an accident. Its ‘H’ shaped format

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex also included bulkheads at either end for mounting a motor. Its only disadvantage was the frontal area it presented, for the cross-members were each 40cm deep. I saw no reason however why the chassis could not be wrapped in flexible panels like a tortilla to produce the sort of thicker wing section that was ideal for surface-skimming aircraft. By Boxing Day I was back in the loft making foam sandwiches, although there had not been a respite on Christmas Day, when I took a stroll in warm sunshine around the ponds in Stanborough Park, which looked better than ever for testing. Assembly in Southampton had not been wholly straightforward and the foam I strapped to the roof of the car to bring back to Hatfield decided to separate not a half-mile down the road, where two of the panels were run over. I had to remind myself that they cost a hundred pound each. As part of an end-of-year clearout I went through past patents, trademarks and domain names, deciding that much of the froth associated with the project had to go. Too many friends had been neglected and opportunities passed by, and I was determined in 2006 to do more with less. More than ever I was determined to go local and test both the model and the prototype here in Hatfield, where my first tentative experiments had been made. The fact the town once played a prominent part in aviation might be worth some mileage whenever I approached the local council for assistance. With my remaining foam I made a model larger than 1/3 scale that warranted a more suitable engine than the redundant fan, which was designed to turn at 25,000 rpm. Conventional model propellers run at less than a third of this speed and optimum thrust requires

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a balance between engine speed and propeller ‘pitch’. I therefore part-exchanged a radio-control set I had bought (that included instructions only in German) for a four-stroke glow-plug engine, and then sat for hours contemplating were best to put it. I know that you will have your own suggestions. It too required compromise, for a weighty unit like the engine is best placed in the middle of the craft, or further forward to stabilise it like a dart in flight. On the other hand there was an argument for putting it at the back where it made less noise, or as high up as possible to avoid ingress of water. There was also the practical need to access the engine while at sea, combined with the danger of upending at the same time. Finally there was the need for adequate clearance between the propeller tips and the water, and the question of whether a drive train would be used. Originally cars were rear-wheel driven because it was easy to arrange, requiring only a drive shaft that ran the length of the vehicle, accommodated by a hump in the floor. In ships the engines were amidships to spread the weight, which also required a prop-shaft. Nonetheless so long as every other contingency is met, it is more efficient for the propeller to be close as possible to the power unit; it is also the simplest and lightest of solutions. The upshot of this was that I determined to fit the engine somewhere behind my head, so that the craft would sit gently nose-up before the off. It had the advantage that the ‘thrust-line’ coincided with the viewpoint of the pilot, and that the airflow from the propeller would pass over the tail-plane and provide a force for raising or lowering the nose.

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex By now I was convinced the concept was a going concern, though it was all that I could do during a dismal January to motivate myself sufficiently to complete the task. My favourite films were those in black and white filmed in the North of England in the 1950s, among them The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner, about a schoolboy who throws up any chance of victory on the final straight, because he cannot see the point of it all. It appeals to any Englishman who has had to endure the silliness of dressing in inadequate clothing and running around in the rain, which includes everyone from my own generation Then there was If, the film in which schoolchildren gunned down every authority figure in sight from the roof of the refectory. Fantastic. I could have done it myself to any number of people at the Patent Office, for I was surprised to learn that the trademark examiner had rejected the application that featured the side profile of the craft. He said it looked like an elementary part of either a boat or aeroplane ~ which of course is precisely what it was in my case ~ and that trademarks were not allowed to simply reproduce the appearance of components. I supposed this meant that the design of the Coca-Cola bottle for instance could be registered as a design, but not as a trademark, because while it was distinctive it was nonetheless a glass bottle and nobody held exclusive rights to those. Either way I was disenchanted with trademarks of any sort and decided they were an unnecessary distraction. Judge for yourselves, however:

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As part of the new focus I began to research ways to reduce the financial burden of Core-Cell panels. They were expensive because the company distributing them had an effective monopoly. The sort of wooden boards that lined building sites cost less than a tenth of these and would certainly have done for mock-ups. All of this involved much research and running around, and although these interregnums between flying jobs had the feel of student holidays, they achieved a great deal. It was during one of these for instance that I first put together panels at all, and during another that I realised the same material could be used for the section between each blade. Meanwhile it cost £2000 to put the Peugeot in running order and fit it with a tow-bar. Pulling these flying boats along the motorway would be a potent form of advertising. I was due to begin a flying contract based north of the border and January was rapidly moving on. The micro-light engine was about ready to collect and the prototype half complete, so I considered spending a week in Southampton putting the two together. I did

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex not at all relish the idea of going anywhere near the water during winter, though at least imagining it might spur me into buying a wetsuit. I had by now realised that foam could be used to support the engine itself; though it took a while. The process of invention is often one of escaping the straitjacket to which our thinking is ordinarily confined. Before moving to Southampton, for inspiration I watched a Horizon documentary featuring the ‘X-prize’ for the first commercial sub-orbital space flight. While others went over-budget on exotic delivery and recovery techniques, Burt Rutan settled for a piggy­ back air launch and conventional landing, reconfiguring the aircraft for re-entry ‘like a shuttlecock’, to contain the speed and keep the craft on a stable trajectory. It was flawless. What was interesting was how Rutan had turned to space only after completing thirty-nine aircraft projects and becoming bored. He regretted how he could have achieved the feat thirty years sooner had he had the courage. Courage is generally all that separates us from our dreams so long as we have persistence too. He still built scale models from plastic panels and launched them from the control tower ~ and probably the reason he did better than NASA was because they had abandoned such prosaic means of testing. One day I received an email from Holland asking whether I intended using ‘panelplane.com’ for the purpose of building panel aeroplanes, implying that my logic in choosing the name could hardly be faulted. In an effort to rationalise my wayward course, I figured it had produced three distinct types in the Cushion Car, which described the outline of a flying car and led in

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turn to the Blade Boat, which exemplified fast-build methods using foam. In turn it had spawned the wholly promising Panel Plane. Down at Portsmouth, in this instance, I checked into a Travelodge, which was more of a motel than hotel, and if necessity was the mother of invention then this was the first clause. Although I regretted the decision it was only how I had felt under other changes of circumstances that were eventually (and sometimes it was a long eventually) all to the good. I needed to be here for access to the workshop, to put paid to the prototype and christen it in the local estuary. Realistically no one was going to do this for me. I was informed that the motor was ready for collection too, and as my brother had pointed out, with fifty horsepower behind me I would be going somewhere, but nobody knew in what direction. One thing that I realised in the confines of the motel room (and I am typing this at five o’clock in the morning) was that by using luggage straps with a ratchet system I could fasten the parts of the boat together and glue at the same time. The legendary Kelly Johnson at Lockheed’s ‘Skunk Works’ always said that it was better to get things eighty per cent right than waste time on the last twenty. Nothing in life was nearly perfect anyway, and it was curious how we demanded perfection from products while accepting considerably less in ourselves. If nothing else, anyway, I had to come away with some pictures of a full-scale prototype outside of the workshop or ideally in the water. Thus far the only one I had attempted never got beyond the four walls of a museum. ‘Conceive, construct and convince…’

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex Another task I had in Southampton was to examine ways of reducing the cost of materials and the labour involved in their assembly. For the sandwiches for instance I was determined to reduce the reliance on Core-Cell, which like a family member had helped once but was now too demanding and had shamefully to be cut off from the inheritance. Plywood was a fifth of the cost and I was convinced there was any number of substitutes out there. At least one design agency had told me that the problem with all composite suppliers was they were inclined to recommend the most exotic materials for the revenue. One thing that annoyed me about resins was that they could not yet be considered consumables, but were sold instead through arcane distributors like a form of hardcore pornography. Either that or they were supplied in minute quantities at DIY stores, where they cost more than a headache cure. Businesses work by conning consumers for so long as they can get away with it, and in the UK this was exemplified by say British Airways or British Telecom, both of whom continued to market travel or communication as luxury long after they had ceased to be so. And something else I was rapidly falling out with was fibreglass, which had given me any number of unpleasant splinters. It had to go. You might consider this an irrational fear ~ of the sort say that instilled in Hitler a suspicion of anyone who had neither greasy hair nor a small moustache ~ and you would be right. Finally the ceaseless travel around the country convinced me as much as anything that every aspect of the product had to be scaled to the proportions and ambitions of the back yard, where the idea had its roots in the beginning. This meant it had to be distributed

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most effectively and reduced to the lowest denomination for the consumer. The materials had to be stored in the garage, and then assembled and housed in the same place, with dimensions to match. Everything had to derive from panels, a stock-in-trade of the modern world and the common currency by which materials were most easily sold, packaged and shipped. I could achieve as much with a week off as ordinarily I would achieve in a month when I combined the activity with the day job. Aside from occasional visit to suppliers the week was entirely devoted to retrieving the parts from a failed attempt at binding the blades and chassis together and starting again. At the decidedly (cold) temperatures that we were working under, none of the resins were at all fast and in the longer term this made heated ovens or ‘autoclaves’ look inevitable, even if it meant wooden shuttering and electric blankets. For now what it meant using faster resins applied with mastic guns for spot welding operations, so that assembly was not delayed while surface coats were cured. Using luggage straps besides adhesive meant the deck and stabiliser could be joined along one side, while the boat was turned over almost immediately to join them to the other. By the weekend the boat was ready for fitting out, the way the Titanic launched in Belfast: two thousand panels of steel but no engines. Except in our case (and this was not an option with the Titanic) it was going to be winched up to the ceiling of the workshop out of the way. This was as much progress as the cash burn allowed for the moment, and before leaving I took the chance to drive down to the stretch of water where we envisaged the initial launch. When would my boat come in?

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Although the boat was still constructed of a SAN-PUSAN sandwich, at the end of a week that had cost over £700 in expenses alone, I decided that using Core-Cell exclusively would have innumerable advantages that offset the extra cost. Ultimately it would mean that I would be able to convert a ready case of sixteen 20 mm panels into a flying machine, which would make shipping material direct to the customer that much simpler. It also took me closer to my objective of shifting substantial volume exclusively over the internet As a part of this new impetus I agreed with Graeme, the company secretary, to change our name to ‘Panelplane Limited’ and applied for the same trademark, so that along with the ‘dotcom’ domain name we had built up an impregnable fortress around the brand. Amongst all of this activity I was still juggling job applications and because of the competitive pressures stemming from deregulation, potential employers were loath to commit anything to paper. Whenever application forms required details of achievement or club membership, I was often at a loss. (On this

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occasion I included my presidency of the school Geography Society, a role my brother had filled with aplomb, organising worthy pursuits like hikes in the Lake District. I had settled for borrowing the school projector and screening epic motor races from the 1950s featuring the exploits of Fangio in his ‘blown’ Alfa Romeos. On the few occasions I did show films on say, tea plantations in Africa, these were usually shown backwards to alleviate the boredom). I was astonished at the detail required, like grades in examinations taken before puberty. In itself it was an index of the anal retentiveness of the company involved; Britannia for example would rather cancel flights than recruit a captain whose Art ‘O’ level grade was missing. I left the workshop the week before I was due to begin flying again, resolved to building the flying boat from Core-Cell panels glued together and sealed by epoxy. And having discovered that the panels were produced at 30 mm as well as 20 mm I would use those instead so as to reduce the amount of laminating required. Panels at this thickness were discounted in packs of ten and I calculated that was all we needed. The foam would be down to a thickness of six centimetres, although the latest outline of the boat was more rigid. Six centimetres was a convenient multiple of both 20 and 30 mm panels, so that customers could choose either, an important factor if ever supplies were restricted. After returning to Hertfordshire I was able to install broadband, and this was so easy that I forgave BT there and then. At once this left me free to roam and among the first of my discoveries was the fact that a company in Rochdale not only cut foams to any shape

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turkeY, NOv 2005 OrIeNt ex but that they made one specifically for marine construction. The Core-Cell I was used to weighed in at 92kg/cubic metre, while this PU foam was 96kg/ cubic metre and available in thicknesses of up to one foot. At the same time I called the West System distributor in Romsey and they sent me a catalogue and price list. It occurred to me that I had never seen a price list from SP and had always just coughed up the cash. They were like an expensive girlfriend who for all her charms was ruining you at the same time. There was a difference of emphasis too, for West System had a folksy feel about them and their catalogue was full of tips about using epoxy glues around the home, while their brochures were filled like a photo album with pictures of boats that customers had built. There was also news from the patent agent, who sent the results of the search on ‘prior art’ relating to cutting a standard panel up to formulate the profile of the boat. It had produced only background material i.e. previous published patent specifications with no direct bearing upon our own. This left the agent optimistic of our chances of eventually being awarded a UK patent for what I considered the most significant aspect of the project. It was only four-by-eight ply, but it certainly looked good. Like David Beckham I supposed. And at the end of January I got a handle on the comparative cost of different foams: Trident’s PU foam was a little over £700 for a 300mm caseload and Corecell was over £1600, or more than twice the price. As the former held out the prospect of providing the kit materials for less than £ 1,000 the attraction was immediate.

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 ~ sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes Beginning in February I was back at the BA training centre at Heathrow, at the behest of an airline in Scotland. Inevitably here I met ex-colleagues from British Midland who had joined BA and thus arrived on a higher plane altogether. In the canteen, notwithstanding the political correctness of BA’s recruitment policy, to be sat among their pilots was to be transported to a scene from Tom Brown Schooldays; they made the Waffen SS look a model of diversity. Back at the hotel I was afforded relief by a programme on record-breaking runs across Bonneville Flats by Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons. During the first half of the century the British had monopolised this endeavour and the record set by John Cobb (at over four hundred miles per hour) stood long after he died trying it in a boat. Although it was achieved before the war, thirty years passed before the record was challenged. In the event only a car with a jet engine was able to break the record. I had always felt that this was pointless, because if you chose not to get airborne then every jet fighter was a potential record-breaker. Watching this history of events however, I was persuaded. Craig Breedlove was sponsored at the age of twenty-four and went on to build a series of cars fitted with fighter jet engines that eventually took the record beyond 600 mph, a record that lasted until in the 1990s Richard Noble’s car finally broke the sound barrier. Just how frightening this must all have been was evident from the programme; Craig Breedlove on one occasion crashed into a telegraph pole at four

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes hundred miles an hour. And although someone with a name like Craig Breedlove seemed destined for this life, the improbable Art Arfons was a both a farm-hand and a genius. He wrested the record back using a J79 jet engine acquired from a scrap dealer. It took six months to rebuild and afterward General Electric wanted it back as it still contained embargoed technology. After crashing when one of his wheel bearings disintegrated at six hundred miles an hour, he emerged without a broken bone. Something else that I felt had been sent to cheer me up was a sample pack from Trident Foams. It included ‘swatches’ containing foams in different colours and densities. I pondered the idea of approaching the chief executive directly for sponsorship, or at least to the extent of free material for prototypes. It looked like the foams could be pigmented in every colour under the sun, so that I could satisfy the most exotic consumer tastes. I quite liked orange. Instead, by the second week in February I was back at Gatwick for a conversion course I felt was not entirely necessary. I had once relished flying training, but now it was a necessary evil. It was when I was here in April of 2003 (when again I was supposed to be retraining on the 737) that I came up with a car with wings contained by fenders and during three years since I had moved beyond preliminary sketches to model making and construction of a prototype. What was once pie-in-the-sky now at least had the semblance of a viable business model. Now instead in my free time I finished a book on Sir George Cayley, who was not strictly the Father of Aviation as so often he is called, but among the first to identify the problem of flight and consistently test theories against it.

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The first day of the course was not everything it could have been, because on a tea break I recognised someone at another table who had recently interviewed me for a job. As I had assured him of my unrestricted availability, he would be wondering what I was doing there, and I briefly considered hiding under the table. Later over dinner in the pub my simulator partner told me that his marriage had failed after thirty years and that he was fighting for custody of their dog. It was at such times that I would wonder whether all that lay before the yawning grave was years of flying pasty people to Tenerife. Combining the project with a new job was always a period of turmoil. Although it was nice to fly again after two months, the demands of line training were tiresome. Year by year the combined threat of Al Quaeda and the Civil Aviation Authority ~ and I was unsure who was worst ~ eliminated any pleasure there was to be had from flying airliners. Meanwhile relocating the project was equally wearing and at times I drove from Glasgow to Hatfield one day and returned the next, a total of fifteen hours. It was something you would do only if you had the misfortune be selling photocopiers in middle age. To make it worthwhile, I fixed the remaining foam from the garage to my new roof bars, and having lost panels twice before I trussed it up like a regular at Madame Cynthia’s. At first I cruised along at 50 mph, though with increasing boredom it became 80 mph. I knew the cargo was still secure for every gust was transferred directly to the chassis of the Peugeot. I was used to driving airliners at two hundred miles an hour, and this was nothing new. I imagine that more than one motorist was

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes surprised to be overtaken by an old saloon and a cubic metre of plastic. At times it all got too much. When I suggested dropping the prototype off with Rod, who supplied the engine, after a ‘cooling off ’ period he accused me instead of taking advantage; it might ‘blow away in a gale’, the farmer might want more rent, I might not collect it for weeks, it might attract aliens from outer space…though he probably had me sussed, for inventors are like lunatics whose world is filled with possibilities that elude saner people. Rod was rightly put off by the fact I had yet to decide definitively whether to fit the engine at the front or rear, for example, although in every evolving product the vocabulary is often there without the syntax. At one point driving South I idly reviewed the many surfaceskimming designs that I had drafted in the past and realised that the foam profile I had devised would suit any number of them, for they only needed this key to unlock their potential. I sometimes doubted whether it was necessary to have extended the original patent beyond a couple of pages (for inventions are like examinations and the answer you first thought of rarely needs embellishing), though it now looked like I could embellish it to the nth degree. Meanwhile more mundane things required attention, like completing my overdue tax return and finding somewhere to live. In Glasgow I was in a hotel room where I was close enough to direct aircraft on the apron opposite. I would have preferred the Stakis Hotel nearby, since sold to the Hilton chain. The taxi driver who drove us to Edinburgh one evening told me he had known the founder as a family friend. Rio

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Stakis, I think he was called, arrived from Greece as a salesman and built up a chain of hotels over a lifetime, the sort of enterprise the British normally deplored. With no immediate heir, the chairman gave his nephew a shareholding, which he promptly combined with others to sell the company from under its owner. Rich but largely unemployed, the founder died soon after. It made me question the wisdom of building an enterprise to see it washed away like a sandcastle; or as the anti-hero in the film Dodgeball put it, ‘If you’ve no goals in life you can never be disappointed.’ There was better news on propellers. Conrad the hovercraft-racer had sourced a multi-bladed propeller with a diameter of only four feet that could be accommodated inside the width of my design. Most of his own sales derived from the internet, and I knew that out there somewhere were people who would gladly pursue this life less ordinary. It was unrealistic to imagine those around me combining the exigencies of daily life with a secret penchant for surface skimming, in the way that a legal secretary might also pose for pornographic pictures. (If you find that notion as exciting as I did, be assured it was drawn from real-life). I soon found accommodation, ironically, at a place called Pannell Farm, in the form of a holiday cottage and workshop. A carpenter last used it, but had since moved to the Isle of Arran. It was big enough for three of my craft and after securing the deal I drove to Port Glasgow to see the abandoned dry-docks on the Clyde. The estuary was still tidal here and I resolved to drive further round the coast to Largs in search of possibilities (and to Dumbarton where a museum housed the oldest test tank, which was longer than a

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes football pitch). The same day I took some longoverdue exercise at a gym in Renfrew, where a girl in a bikini passing back and forth doing the backstroke made my stint on the treadmill so much easier. My thoughts naturally drifted toward the reproductive antics of dolphins, whose erections were proudly displayed on a National Geographic programme. And this was something the BBC had managed to shield from my eyes for forty-five years. Although Jacob Bronowski said that humans were alone in copulating face-to-face, he clearly missed this programme. It must though be difficult to swim at the best of times without having to carry out intercourse at the same time, and I wondered whether an anthropological breakthrough of this kind might be made in the pool at Renfrew. (For those of you with an active interest in the sex lives of marine mammals, incidentally, the walrus sports a penis bone, while the average whale produces four gallons of sperm. Try wiping that up with Kleenex.) Meanwhile, because the profile I had devised was wholly adaptable I set out to design a much simpler aircraft altogether. In this, the sides would be closer together so the overall width was just sufficient to accommodate a seat. The engine could be mounted on the seat back, and for wings I could replace the centre-section with panels along each side. The latest configuration was a culmination of a number of ideas I had had over several years, all of which however lacked the crucial ingredient that foam panels proved to be. Most inventions are a marriage of mind and material, so that the telephone, aeroplane, radio and computer each required advances in key constituents. The radio was impossible without the transistor, and

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the computer without the silicon chip. The aeroplane and car were none-starters without the internal combustion engine, and the telephone required a network of copper wires established for the telegraph. If my success were recognised at all, it would be from building with foam panels. Besides compact propellers I was shown lighter motors that were developed for powered parachutes, but which suited this simpler prototype altogether better. During the first week in March, as the lambs emerged in the field outside, I spent a lot of time assembling flat-pack furniture (which in the light of developing an aeroplane along the same lines, I enjoyed more than ever) or laying out the workshop. It included a mezzanine level in chipboard and a partfinished store in the corner. With temperatures barely above freezing it meant the resins would not set, and so I used material from the mezzanine to finish the store, which was somewhere I could bake the foam. As so often the exercise eventually proved futile, for it left little room for moving around, which was a must for applying large quantities of resin. Another problem was that the panels I was to use had warped and were not easily glued without some form of pressure. For this I needed something like either an olive- or printing-press, and it was ironic that these very practical necessities could be said to have produced our world; for Greek democracy was nothing without a good dinner, nor the words of the Enlightenment anything without ink. To deploy the weight necessary I toyed with presses hung from the walls or suspended from the rafters, or quantities of water stored in makeshift reservoirs. I

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes realised eventually that the answer was parked outside, and later I drove the car up and parked it over the foam sandwiches. As I closed the door on the car with its engine running I suspected that the farmer must be worrying that it had all become too much. Something similar had happened in Southampton when Brett had rigged up a winch from the rafters and a man in search of a cup of tea had asked ‘Not that bad is it, Brett?’

While I waited for my sandwiches to set, I calcuated that a standard panel was 2.98 square metres, so that every centimetre thickness had a volume of around 30 litres, and that it weighed three kilos. The brightest of you will have spotted that this is just a tenth of the mass of water (and that foam would make the perfect upside-down iceberg ~ one that even the Titanic might have avoided). This time my material included five layers: an outer skin of ply, two panels of 20 mm CoreCell and thicker layer of polyurethane. Each of the four surfaces to be joined consumed a litre of epoxy resin. Later I foolishly reverted to an adhesive used for sealing plaster, and the failure put me off laminating for good. As a result, I telephoned the owner of Trident

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Foams and arranged to meet him, for he produced foam cut to any thickness. (And while all of this was going on, John Profumo had died. I had enjoyed the book in which Christine Keeler reflected upon these events, tinged with bitterness at the predisposition of politicians to exploit all that they touch. Watching the newsreels in black and white, what most impressed me was that unlike everything else, London cabs looked no different). When I first arrived in Glasgow in February it had been uncharacteristically mild and sunny, although now I woke one Sunday in March to the sound of eight inches of snow sliding from the roof. Eventually it turned to rain and continued in this vein for three days. It was not the proper snow that I remembered from the winter of ’62 that sat on the ground for up to six weeks and froze milk solid, but the global-warming variety that screwed over your travel plans. It meant that I could not drive down to Stockport to meet with Trident Foams and to turn the setback to advantage I turned to modelling, using leftovers to construct a 1/6 sized version of the new winged skimmer. There would be plenty of lift even at slow speeds, because the extra wingspan would produce more ‘ground effect’, which is what happens when aeroplanes get near the surface and squeeze air underneath. The effect is supposed to operate to a height equal to the wingspan itself, so that now it would assist up to ten feet. In practical terms this meant that if it had the power to get airborne, the Mark II would be able to sustain flight above the waves. With the weather holding me under house arrest, I went to see a movie of the kind that only I would

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes want to see. (On a date in London I once took a girl to see Mishima, about the Japanese novelist who selfimmolated himself around the time that my date fell asleep. Another time, such was the popularity of Jaws that the remaining two seats were in the fifth and seventeenth rows respectively, a margin that would satisfy the Pope.) Now however I was to see Anthony Hopkins portray the life of Burt Monro, a New Zealander who pitched up uninvited at a Bonneville Race Week and established a record that still stands (for streamlined motorcycles of less than 1,000 cc). Well into his sixties, he coaxed an Indian motorcycle of almost the same vintage to speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. Returning altogether refreshed (‘It’s the man in the arena that counts…’) I took the same make-do-and-mend approach to completing my new model. At least working inside the glue set that much more quickly, especially if the parts were popped in the oven. When I found that some of the parts were too large to fit, I used a shower curtain as an appendix, an insight so original that I had to take a picture:

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During the course of assembly I discovered that one of the feature-writers of Aero-Modeller magazine lived only in the next village. Furthermore he had written a round-up of recent model seaplane activity, much of which had taken place upon local lochs. Around eleven one morning I drove over and parked outside his house, which showed no signs of life. After an inordinately long time Alistair appeared in a dressing gown and peered around the front door. I said I had a surface-skimming vehicle; he said he had a shocking cold. And he did not ‘do’ wing-in-ground-effect anyway. I was about to say there was no better time to start, but instead settled for a telephone number. I wondered how many meetings heavy with expectation must have gone the same way. When my brother-inlaw managed to find Beethoven’s birthplace in Vienna, he had asked ‘Can you show me Beethoven’s house?’ only for a resident to tell him that ‘nobody called Beethoven lives round here…’ By the end of the same day I had the motor fitted to the model. The fuelling itself, which I elected to do in the kitchen, took longer than I normally waited for a Boeing 737. By six o’clock though Mission Control gave me the green light and in the workshop I lashed the model to a concrete block. The starter consisted of a hand-held electric motor with a rubber sucker to press on the hub of the propeller. The first time it unscrewed the propeller altogether, which would not have been good in a combat situation. Concerned about fuel starvation I disconnected the tubing, which had the same effect as severing a jugular in surgery. With these mishaps behind me, I applied the charger to the glow plug and set the throttle at what I guessed

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes was three-quarters closed, though which subsequent events proved to be three-quarters open. For a time the engine burbled along and merely unburdened the starter motor without gaining momentum. After I paused to nudge the throttle, when I tried again the ensuing noise and smoke were spectacular, and the engine strained like a crazed horse while I died from its exhaust. In the event it was a blessing I stopped it when I did, for I had only glued the motor in place and after running like a jackhammer it was minutes from escaping. Nonetheless, something apart from my penis had finally throbbed in expectation:

Reactions to the model from those who saw it were wholly positive, among them the manager at Trident Foams. The meeting was most informative. Polyurethane (PU) foams were oil derivatives, and the cost of raw materials had increased by sixty percent in eighteen months. They took the form of two liquids that were mixed in a shallow mould the size of a pond, a process like baking bread. In fact the resulting product was known as a ‘bun’. These were sliced by the world’s largest cheese-cutter, which could accommodate

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blocks the size of a small room. We calculated that it could produce thirty of my pontoons at any one time. Although a lot of the foam was supplied to luxury motor-yacht builders, the bulk of it went for flower arranging and I think Phil relished an opportunity to lend his materials to my more rugged pursuits. Eventually too I got to see Alistair in the next village, the Aero-Modeller man. I took him the model and spent thirty minutes on the rudiments of aerodynamics before he told me that he had been a British Airways captain. He offered to come along to the local loch for flight-testing, although had not the time to complete anything I might build. I think fitting out one’s own models was something you were expected to do yourself, in the way that you could not expect someone to wash your car, for example. I felt like a Hobbit with all of this sound advice from people who never intended coming with me to find the ring; so encouraged by the weather I promptly returned home and slept until midday. The latest design was getting me down too, and I decided to pull the model apart. I got as much pleasure from doing this as from building, for an indefinable urge to destroy runs like a thread throughout humanity, and we often deplore vandalism in others if we were not there to enjoy it ourselves. On teenage hikes in the Peak District occasionally we set rocks tumbling from the hillsides mainly for the thrill of not knowing where they were headed once a decision to ‘go nuclear’ had been made. The destruction of giant Buddhas in Afghanistan must have had that same feeling of ‘I will if you will’ for the Taliban. If Armageddon ever happens it will be because someone who enjoyed

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes throwing fireworks as a child finds himself with a bigger box. In the past at times like this I would give up, for with each modification the design lost any semblance of the original concept. In the way that we are all dead in the long run anyway, the most convenient invention is the one that means not having to get out of bed in the first place. It is why most men count themselves as inventors, the way they also feel that they would be successful with women, given half a chance. Successful entrepreneurship however can be measured by tangible economic returns in a way that invention cannot, so that the latter is rarely taken seriously, and rightly so. I needed to persuade myself that there was still core value in ‘planes from panels’, and so on a day that felt like the first day of Spring I took the chance to visit the test tank at Dumbarton. The only other in the UK was at the National Physical Laboratory. That in Scotland was a conventional tank along which model ships were towed, whereas in Teddington the models stayed put while water was driven past them. Surprisingly the older type proved more accurate. William Froude was a Devonshire pioneer of hydro­ dynamics and built the tank for the Denny Shipyard. Before this time the performance of ships was guessed at, a practice whose errors proved increasingly costly as ships increased in size. While the shipyard once employed three and a half thousand, ten times fewer worked in Morrisons, which replaced it, and Margaret Thatcher would have been delighted to hear that men who once formed rivets were arranging bio-yoghurts instead. Model ships like the carrier Invincible were up to thirty-five feet long and at one time a half dozen

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woodcutters made such models from tree trunks. As the test facility was so lavish with wood and water supplies, Froude designed a system for making giant wax models that could be melted down and reused afterward. Victorian engineers like Froude thought of everything except sex:

Standing on Dunbarton castle afterward afforded an inspiring view across the mudflats of the Clyde, silverplated in the afternoon sun and teeming no longer with freight, but with flocks of wading birds. While my craft would emulate their effortless flight, I wondered whether letting any number of them loose would not intrude upon springtime idylls like this. Was I Mars, Slayer of Wading Birds? Or a tasty snack you could eat between meals? The weeks into April were a little rudderless. I purchased software to draft 2-D templates and never learned how to use it, and told the patent agent about my intention to concentrate on the design with ‘outrigger’ wings. I had nonetheless brought the model hydroplane to Scotland and it looked graceful and

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes purposeful next to the aircraft, which looked like a schoolboy project. The versatility of the concept could be a blessing and a curse, although the Iranians unwittingly provided a shot-in-the-arm for the aircraft type during this same month. Still actively pursuing a nuclear programme, they had also gone in for sabrerattling exercises on the Straits of Hormuz, and among their hardware was a ‘revolutionary’ and ‘stealthy’ form of flying boat. It turned out to be a copy of the Flarecraft that Alexander Lippisch had operated over the North Sea in the 1960s, which failed to exploit the leisure market in North America. Any resemblance between it and ‘stealth’ was purely coincidental, for at the time the technology was unknown. Nonetheless I was pleased a warmongering Middle-Eastern state was conducting PR on my own account:

Aside from these developments I took myself to Irvine, where a branch of the Scottish Maritime Museum had reassembled a workshop from the Clyde. It might have been easier to move the museum, but it ran contrary to government policy for ‘revitalising the regions’. A feature of capitalism is that money flows to where it will be made best use of, while the task of government is to divert it with schemes like The Big Idea, which lay

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unused across the River Irvine. It had been grantfunded, but closed shortly afterward for a lack of tourists, and the Scottish inventors listed on its portals would have been appalled at such profligacy. However I found my visit here so rewarding that I offered them a prototype. There was a monumental steam hammer, beside the wooden ‘patterns’ used to cast the turbines of the Queen Elisabeth II. There were sections of model super-tankers made of plywood and Perspex, filled with tiny bits of machinery and associated cables, for before computers someone had to painstakingly reproduce the layout at 1/50th scale. There was an air of melancholy around the place too: a rowboat washed up in Norway after its oarsman lost contact one hundred days into an Atlantic crossing, and the trawler in which four fishermen from Galloway perished after a RN submarine dragged it down. My favourite exhibit was one of the half-models that occupied the teashop. I had seen countless models of this kind, which were predicated on the basis that you only ever had to design half of a hull because the other half was identical. These sections were often mounted in a frame like a prize­ winning salmon and presented to whichever magnate had provided the commission. The model here was mounted on a mirror instead, so that it displayed a whole ship for half the work:

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes I cannot leave Irvine too without righting a misconception that must be universal in the Englishspeaking world: the naval expression ‘freeze the balls off a brass monkey’ had nothing to do with testicles, I learned, for the brass monkey was a ring that retained a pile of cannon balls on deck. When it was so cold that the balls contracted faster than the ring, the pile collapsed. I still preferred the schoolboy version though. It was Easter by now and I joined the congregation at Paisley Abbey, a decision rewarded by a Mozart prelude at one end and a trumpet voluntary at the other, with a good deal of uplifting content in between. I could see why Christianity had clung on to the fringes of the British Isles like a barnacle in the ebb and flow of invasions, and I was even more impressed by the way the bread and wine were delivered directly to the pew: ‘Can I super-size those sacraments for you, Sir?’ In the newspaper afterward I read how jet-skis were the fastest-growing source of marine pollution in the United States, and that a third of the pollution could be traced to this source, which was another reason for using aero-engines instead. Like jet-skis most outboards were still two strokes that burned their lubricating oil with the fuel and discharged unburned elements of each into the sea. On the Tuesday after the holiday I set off to see a graphic designer in Troon, who might help produce files for computer-controlled cutting machines. Colin McLeod was chosen because we shared the same name, although why it meant I should trust him any more than a Cecil was not unclear. Not only had he once worked at British Aerospace in Prestwick, but he also lectured on graphics in Glasgow. I left him with a

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profile of the boat with a promise it would be immortalised as an Adobe Illustrator file. Toward the end of April I repaired to the Scilly Isles however, happy to take a back seat while the train transported us to Penzance, from where a helicopter continued to Tresco. The helicopter was of the same type I had taken nearly forty years previously, and as it returned us afterward over azure seas at five hundred feet, I realised I had never really wanted to fly airliners in the first place. It was awkward recognising this only after nine thousand flying hours, though flying helicopters had once been an ambition of mine, which I had not had the confidence to pursue. It meant that at this latest juncture in life I was all the more determined to pursue another means of flying over turquoise seas, and knowing that ultimately it would prove more satisfying. We rarely lose the memory of thwarted ambitions altogether, however, and reminders like this were bitter sweets. When I returned to Scotland at the end of the month I turned to producing fifthscale mock-ups of the two varieties that I had in mind, which would form the basis of the patent that would be pursued overseas. The invention would hinge upon the production of the similar profiles from panels of foam, but there were to be two ‘embodiments’ including a hydroplane with wider set blades, and an aeroplane with a narrow fuselage and separate wings. The latter was easiest to construct, particularly when I realised that I could laminate identical sections of foam to make a seat of the required width. While this happened J.K. Galbraith died at ninetyseven. He was among the first to suggest that the Affluent Society would not benefit everybody.

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sCOtLANd, FeB 2006 sILeNCe OF the LAMINAtes Globalisation is a function of over-population, for it depends on a market that only dense urban populations are able to support. While it generally drives prices down, we have to distinguish between raw materials and manufactured product. As we only have one world, finite supplies of anything become expensive even as their products grow cheaper, so that as the cost of oil barrels upward motor cars become ever cheaper thanks to the efficiency of production. The only escape lay in substitution, in the way oil allowed cars to supplant locomotives, or the way oil itself was replaced in homes by electricity. The substitution of glass fibres for copper wires in telecommunication networks was what had lifted us out of the industrial age and into the information age. We nonetheless still needed material goods however, and the challenge was to make them more efficient than ever. My foams boats did this. In many ways it was a frustrating time though, and one that convinced me that I no longer enjoyed ‘inventing’, a fruitless pursuit like train-spotting that cuts people off from society. For fear of fiddling with models for a third consecutive summer, I would build the prototype precisely as it appears below and worry later about how the wings might fit. Apart from the lustrous head of hair, it could almost be me sitting there:

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 ~ GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO Most invention is delusional, and makes inventors happy so long as they never have to put their ideas to the test; in the way people imagine generally assume that they could run a business (or the country) better than anyone else; they live in a state of unproven panacea. In glorious weather on May 5th, by which time swallows circled the barn opposite my window, I set off to see an enterprise that had clearly been as much about perspiration as inspiration. New Lanark was once Britain’s largest cotton mill, and at one time Scotland produced more ships than anyone else and nearly as much cotton. The mill’s founders included Arkwright himself, who invented the spinning jenny. He recognised they could recreate the propitious circumstances of Lancashire valleys here on the Upper Clyde. Although David Dale owned the mill, in the way that Robbie Williams stole the limelight from Take That, New Lanark was best known for Robert Owen. He was credited with many of the desiderata of managed welfare, including health care and child education. His school was called the Institute for the Formation of Character, a title that would not have gone amiss in Stalinist Russia. As with any celebrity, people saw in Owen whatever they chose, so that to some he was a raving Lefty and to others a hard-edged industrialist. The fact that he rejected organised religion went down like a lead balloon in Scotland, and eventually he took his ideas for a utopian community to a town called Harmony in the USA. Naturally with a name like that the town descended into bickering over who did what;

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO and those who felt insufficiently rewarded left inharmoniously to establish another town altogether. (I recalled a community founded by an American lady during the same wacky century, where everyone was supposed to have sex with everyone else ~ a concept that inspired Weybridge. It too failed when couples paired off as usual and probably grew aspidistras besides.) Back at Pannell Farm it was finally warm enough to work in the workshop and over the next few days I bought any amount of material to try out different wings on my newer and narrower outline. During the course of this exercise I built the biggest of any of the models I eventually made, which was based upon the fact that B & Q sold aluminium sheets one metre long; as the panels of full-sized versions were 2.4 m, it was almost half-scale. At these dimensions you get a proper feel for the material, for every type of material is subject to scale effects. You could drop a spider from twenty feet with no hurt feelings on either side, but were you to do it to a twenty-foot spider it would probably break a leg. You would then be in trouble if it knew where you lived. Once the model was complete, I needed to see how it floated. As you will know if you have ever paddled a canoe, the stability of a boat derives from its centres of buoyancy and gravity. Its weight either has to be set low down (where engines normally go) or else it has to be spread wide. In the Southern Ocean, canoeists have always fitted outriggers to their craft for precisely this reason. I too now needed a test-tank, and after casting around for a sheep trough, eventually I returned to the DIY in Linwood where I found an eight-foot paddling pool. In the way that women return from shopping trips with more than they bargained for, I

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returned with an air compressor that including a spraypainting kit and a staple gun. When it burst into life later I put several yards between me and the compressor (convinced it would explode and send shards of steel across the workshop), but when I saw how long it took to pump up my Chinese paddling pool, I was sincerely relieved that I had not selected the foot pump instead. The workshop door was open and six-year old Kirsty wandered in and left on a promise that she would soon be the rightful heir to the paddling pool. Being a woman-inthe-making, she reminded me that this would have to be ‘in about two weeks time’. Before breakfast next day I had topped off the pool and carried the models from the house in great expectation. Although I had told my wife that the static flotation tests were a foregone conclusion, a rude wakening awaited me. I had been toying with the idea of fitting the prototype with an outboard too, but tests revealed it would actually be upside down most of the time. It was top heavy, and would have to be fitted with some form of spar that not only supported the wings, but also supported the boat in the water:

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO It was probably a blessing in disguise, as it meant I could discard all thought of trialling this particular design with an outboard, although the prospect of trying out what was effectively a powered set of water skis was intriguing. It meant though that I could now concentrate on getting each version of the prototype ~ a hydroplane with an outboard and an aeroplane with a propeller ~ into the water, although I intended to develop the second of these in the first instance; frankly with more than six square metres of wing it looked more likely to take off. I suspected that the market would not tolerate something that only half flew, and as the hydroplane would need a lot more speed to stay aloft there was always a danger that it would literally be viewed as a ‘lame duck’. About this time I had been told that there was a grass strip for model aircraft on the road to Greenock, up in the hills, and one morning when unable to sleep any longer I drove to take a look. It had two ‘runways’ along with a starting area and rudimentary catering facilities, while a barbecue stove and plastic chairs bore witness to any number of lazy summer evenings. As I paced the runway I came upon a patch of disturbed earth from which a set of aircraft undercarriage appeared to be poking, although when I pulled it from the earth, what had looked like a dummy pilot turned out to be a dead mole; my ‘undercarriage’ was a trap. As my fingers could have been involved, I awarded the mole a posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross on the spot. By this time it occurred to me that I had barely travelled beyond the Clyde, and so I drove up the west side of Loch Lomond and took the opportunity to call

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on the marina in Dumbarton. I wanted a supply of resins, but came away with a copy of the Gougeon Brothers classic for resin-lovers, The Gougeon Brothers On Boat Construction. The man who sold it to me was semi-retired but had once sat upon a working committee in the UK, and let me know that it was no longer possible to sell kits without reference to the European ‘Recreational Boats Directive’. It was formulated by the British, Dutch and Italians to penetrate the French market, which debarred imports. The French insisted that imported boats did not meet their own standards; but told nobody what the ‘standards’ were, which was the purpose of the directive. The manufacturers at the time said that ‘Britannia rules the waves and France waives the rules.’ Stung by my neglect of the surroundings, adorned as it was with golden gorse and broom, I set off not long after to climb Ben Lomond. As it was above three thousand feet it qualified as the 284th ‘Munro’, and being near Glasgow it was the most accessible. I set off late and in sight of the summit a band of rain accompanied the fierce wind, and so I dug in and treated myself to a BLT before calling off the attempt. On the way down a Search and Rescue helicopter passed by only a hundred feet higher, and like a schoolboy I waved to the pilot. He waved in return after a short pause, which I realised would have been because his right hand would have been engaged at the time in actually flying the helicopter. I imagined the headline: Pilot Loses Control Waving to Chav. On the previous day, May 22, I had had my own mountain to climb. Late in the afternoon I fitted out a working model of the hydroplane with a plain deck

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO and a motor and set it up in the barn. It ran sweetly on top of the work mate, the prows of each blade quivering as the motor purred at a fast idle. I was now wholly familiar with the operation of ‘glow plug’ engines and only had to become adept at radio controls in order to begin testing. At the beginning of June I spent a day fitting these so that I could try the model next day, but in the event it failed miserably. The waves washed liberally over the deck and drove it underwater like a chisel; unlike a marine propeller that would have driven it out of the water, the aero-engine did the opposite. Furthermore the high centre of gravity combined with the high sides threatened to capsize the craft in a quartering tailwind. Had I stuck to the original design with a proper hull, none of this might have happened. The ‘sea trials’ themselves had taken place after coffee and a Danish pastry, so that the stiff breeze was all they had in common with the Wright Brothers flight at dawn. I had driven to the nearest loch to engage in a form of ‘guerrilla’ aero-modelling, ignoring the sign headed PRIVATE and setting up my equipment in the space of five minutes. The craft spent another five minutes on the water and had I not fitted a rudder, it would probably have spent the rest of its time underneath it:

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It did seem that sometimes I rejected designs for no other reason than they bored me, and projects risk failure if familiarity breeds contempt. The whole thing was supposed to be fun, however, and testing the model had been anything but. Maybe a ‘Wright Brothers’ experience at full scale on a beach somewhere would be more edifying. Progress in this direction was furthered in June, when I finally tidied the workshop; until then the place had been so quiet that fledglings were nested in the rafters. Now however I set up a work surface centrally ready for cutting up foam. This arrived in panels of four-inch thickness, and after using two to produce the blades, I had to decide how to cut a third. This really was a crossroads, for it would determine whether the final form was either the aeroplane or hydroplane. If I chose the aeroplane, it would be wandering further from my original goal of making cars fly, although often the best way of getting anywhere was not always the most obvious:

It was on a warm Sunday afternoon in the middle of June that I repaired to the workshop to assemble these pieces, using the contents of a 20 kg tin of polyester

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO resin. Although I was disappointed at the weight that was accreted this way, I later read in the Gougeon Brothers’ book that the weight of epoxy carried by timber boats normally varied between twenty and twenty-five per cent after all. One of the advantages of building at full size as well was that it gave me a good idea of the labour and material involved, besides an idea of the size of the end products and the feasibility of handling them alone. Although I was impressed by how light each piece was, I also wanted each sub­ assembly to be entirely manageable. For instance, I could lift the blades in ten-centimetre PU foam if handles were fitted, although if I stepped down to sixcentimetre SAN then I could carry them regardless. As it was, after I had finished skinning the first blade with glass fibre, I was wondering how to lift it from the workbench without it snapping at the join when there was a knock at the door. Goethe claimed that the whole world seemed to assist whenever we embarked upon enterprises like these, and it was true that sometimes people like this entered ‘stage left’ to assist at crucial junctures, and were never seen again. I half-expected my visitor to say ‘Hi, I’m the guy to help lift the foam.’ It was actually the former tenant, David Samuel, who for ten years had used the workshop to produce not church furniture (as I had been told), but architectural woodwork. He subsequently had a workshop on the Isle of Arran with a panoramic view of the sea, and I wondered what the chances were of encasing him in a vat of resin and phoning in an offer. Speaking of being entombed in resin, shortly after a green-bottle settled upon the pale foam while I was ‘laying up’ the glass fibre with resin, and stupidly it

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strolled around like a picnicker at Chernobyl. I wondered whether it knew why its feet were proving ever harder to lift, or whether it felt it was merely out of shape. Like a schoolboy I watched it stick fast and briefly considered preserving it in the polyester resin, but decided it might be a bad omen that might doom my vessel upon the high seas; it happened to the Great Eastern after two riveters were holed up, and to Campbell’s Bluebird after it killed a gull. At the end of the day I could hardly keep myself awake to watch a documentary about the man in California who hoped to revive our flagging gene pool by collecting the semen of clever men for childless couples. The first genius he selected was having problems tossing in a plastic beaker, which only showed how every attempt at eugenics was doomed to fail. I came away from this third exercise in assembly with the suspicion that the blades might benefit from being stressed. There were only a few ways to stiffen lengths of foam that was designed for flower arranging and one of these was to skin it with glass fibre. I had read that carbon fibre was four times stiffer, though in either case you were either increasing the weight or cost of the finished product. Using thicker foam was cheaper, but still carried a penalty. As the aeroplane was fundamentally narrower than the hydroplane, it occurred to me that I could join the blades at either end like a bow. The principle also drew upon sound engineering fundamentals, for it produced a triangular outline (the most rigid) and it put the foam in tension. The danger of pre-stressed components however was that they failed catastrophically and among the best examples, the stressed-skin Spitfire was more

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO vulnerable to damage than the Hurricane, which was like flying furniture. I also flexed my intellectual property. The domain (panelplane.com) was lodged with my ISP and ready for content, and the corresponding trademark would be granted in June. It was the patent agent who had sold the idea of a European Design Registration, which was effective because it was the only area where Europe had got its act together, and because design registration was ideally suited to material templates. There is no such thing as the ‘world patent’ of popular imagination, but a PCT application filed in one country could be extended to others. I wanted to restrict it to Englishspeaking countries, with the possible exception of China, to avoid the costs of translation. Although scientific papers were published in English in the way that at one time you would publish in Latin, most countries regarded patents as sovereign territory, like national airlines. It probably has to do with the fact that nobody wanted to admit that they were less ingenious than their neighbour. It was short sighted, because more people would know how inventive Brazilians were, for example, if they told us about it in English instead of Portuguese. It was no mistake that the people who most influenced European thought were multilingual, for it was not what language they spoke that mattered but what they had to say. The recent European Song Contest was a good demonstration ~ it was won by Finnish heavy metal sung in English, while a French ballad scored the lowest vote. After votes by text were included, there would clearly be no going back.

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The longest day in Glasgow proved to be among the wettest as well, with the wind gusting at fifty knots and a temperature of barely twelve degrees. I spent it producing yet another model to incorporate my latest thoughts, comforted only by the fact that James Dyson claimed to have produced five thousand prototypes before perfecting his vacuum cleaner. The radio control box featured two joysticks and while I used that on the left in a conventional manner to control the power, I used the right hand stick to operate the rudder in addition to the elevator, which would raise or lower the nose. As my models were designed to skim the surface, banked turns like those of aircraft were less important and I could dispense with ailerons. I could therefore point the thing in the right direction with the right joystick and use the other to open the throttle. In view of my inexperience this had to be a positive. The rudders of larger aircraft are controlled by foot-pedals, which was not an option when you were stood in your woolly hat on the side of the loch. A great deal of effort had been spent on ‘static’ modelling to see how the structure hung together or could be manufactured, and it was soon clear that ‘dynamic’ testing involved almost as much work. Frankly it bored me, though I had a child-like satisfaction in seeing control surfaces meet my every demand. As I grappled with fitting the engine, flight controls or undercarriage what most struck me was the way I reprised the struggles of aeroplane pioneers, for each problem I encountered was as new to me as it had been to them a century before. Proust wrote that at the point of waking we relive the evolution of human consciousness as the brain advances from basic

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO perception through to cognition. Inventors are prone to relive the past, having never learned its lessons. Now the model was complete it looked clumsy with the engine so high up; it might just fly, but from the outset I wanted the concept to perform well in each sphere of travel. This was the key to the flying car, and it did as much as anything to influence me later when I turned back to the hydroplane. Meanwhile I considered alternatives like engines either side where there was more room for propellers, or a drive train that would allow the engine to be lowered. It was at this awkward juncture that I took the remaining models to the tip, now euphemistically called a ‘recycling centre’ in accordance with European best practice. Afterward I drove to Oban to see the Coliseum erected in 1895 by John McCaig, who described himself as ‘Artist, Philosophical Essayist and Banker’ (something I might have called myself when I worked as a clerk in Croydon). None of my own follies would outlive me, unlike this monument to self­ aggrandisement that had also provided employment for stonemasons during winter. The fact it was unfinished made it more imperial and later as I gorged upon beer, fish and chips and enjoyed the spectacle of the 2006 World Cup, I imagined this was an evening that Nero himself would have enjoyed. Afterward as I lay in bed on the morning of the 29th of June, I finally drew in my head a template for the centre-section of the aeroplane of which I could be proud, and which I felt was worthy as the basis for future progress. It may not have looked much, but like the profile of each side earlier on, it had taken me months to get right:

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You probably want an explanation. The longer ‘L’ pair forms the engine mount, and together with the shorter ‘L’ pair (which are glued to either side) they comprise a seat for the pilot too. The remainder is spliced and joined together so that it is identical to the larger ‘L’ profiles, and it is sandwiched between each of these during assembly. Assuming the panel were 10 cm wide, then the overall width of this combination seat and engine-mount would be sufficient to accommodate my ample backside. During the final week in June, upon impulse, after assembling my new trailer I started out at dawn and returned eighteen hours later with the second prototype that we had built in January. I was shocked however by its appearance, as the ravages of wind, sun and rain over the course of six months had left it with the complexion of a Sardinian. Its edges were delaminated, and the cares of time had eaten away at its very marrow. I felt it would stir at my approach, like the ginger horse destined for the knackers yard in Black Beauty. As much as anything I had retrieved it for what the American’s call ‘closure’. (Like so much from

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO the USA, it was a concept that we all laughed at and then eventually adopted.) I needed to put the episode behind me, as I learned to distinguish the accessible from the attainable. When Burt Rutan said that he only lacked courage to develop space flight thirty years earlier, he was probably wrong, for this was to have run before he could walk. We are more likely to succeed by affecting things in our immediate remit, and while the hydroplane might need something extra, like a larger engine, the aeroplane boasted a number of advantages near to hand. It was more easily assembled and with different wing types it promised versatility. Furthermore it included a unique selling point, for if it flew there would be few alternatives once price was factored in. This was not the case with either the boat or the car, whose primary purpose in either case was well served by alternatives. The second of the prototypes was therefore destined for the maritime museum at Irvine, where in view of its advanced state of melanoma it might be exhibited either inside or out. It had certainly entertained any number of lorrydrivers on the M6:

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During the first week in July I contacted the CAA with a view to reserving the registration mark G-PANL, though they would not let me in the event as they felt it was too easily confused with the term PAN which these goons alone in the world reserved for situations that did not warrant a Mayday. More encouraging was the fact that since this narrative was begun, Universal Hovercraft in Illinois had clearly created quite an impression with the fabric wings that they had fitted to hovercraft. They were a substantial concern and owned the domain ‘hovercraft.com’. Their Hoverwing sported a Subaru sports car engine and operated at up to 75 mph and an altitude of ten feet. The ability to fly clear of the waves and benefit from a smoother ride was what most impressed prospective customers, and the company boasted that they offered the world’s first recreational ground-effect vehicle. It was much heavier than my own designs, and subsequent events would soon guide me toward lighter options altogether. On what turned out to be my last day out in Scotland I went to see the Scottish Aviation Museum at East Fortune. Trudging between prefabricated buildings to the accompaniment of skylarks and with the scent of new mown hay took me back nearly thirty years to the military airfields where I learned to fly. I missed the sociability of it all, my open-ended expectations and the carelessness of flying that was funded by someone else and fuelled by full breakfasts. (From time to time as I hauled tons of foam along the motorway, a Tornado jet flashed overhead and disappeared into the valleys of northern England, leaving me wondering how I had come to be condemned to hauling shitty piles of plastic around

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO like Sisyphus.) East Fortune though was where the first westerly trans-Atlantic crossing was launched from, in an airship called the R-34. All three of its officers died later in airships and I made a mental note not to earn a living that way. I realised just how sick I was of airliners, and in particular modern airliners. The collection included a Mark IV Comet from days when jet travel was both unattainable and thus attractive, and when it actually constituted an achievement of sorts to find that you were flying one. The Concorde display here was the best of any, and a tribute to the way in which British politicians can be relied upon to back the wrong horse and then ask us to bale them out. There was also a biplane construction project on the go too, staffed by retirees, as nobody else would still want to make wings by sticking wooden spars together, when you could simply use panels of foam instead:

I was about to retire from Scotland myself, by underestimating the homework required for my flight proficiency test by a large margin. I could not get too excited about it, except to the extent that it had disrupted my arrangements for the summer. Although

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I half-heartedly attended an assessment by Ryanair I left after fifteen minutes (but not before pointing out to the recruiting officer that he (a) was late and (b) could not spell ‘descent’. He asked if it meant that I was ‘withdrawing my candidacy’, in the way John F Kennedy might have asked the man on the grassy knoll whether it was meant personally? Worse was to come, for having broken up the second prototype and driven components of the third to Southampton, Brett was no longer in a position to afford me assistance in view of upcoming commitments. He had put a good deal of effort into one prototype that had been scrapped and there was no guarantee that every other would not go the same way; so the prospect of earning any income seemed further away than ever. I was not relishing the idea of turning up on any other doorstep with a hundredweight of foam, and prevailed upon Brett to store it outside. Pressing circumstances like these, or of any other I encountered, always had the beneficial effect of a following wind, because they made me analyse what really had to be done at each successive stage in order to guarantee success. The second prototype (in hydroplane form) had shown that laminating foam was self-defeating, and although it was only partially assembled, the third showed I had to use thinner panels of foam entirely. The cheaper polyurethane was ideal for filling out the centre section but was too heavy and flexible for the blades, and subsequently I would choose a different foam altogether. By now though I was effectively bankrupt, morally and financially, with only the tax authorities in Holland and the UK for

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sCOtLANd, JuL 2006 GrOuNd eFFeCt ZerO friends. Pick up the newspaper and you could see that any number of men in their mid-forties took their lives, as they so often did in their mid-twenties, and I think the reasons for these cycles of despair are coincidental: in each case there is a period of evaluation when outward circumstances are tested against inner expectations and found wanting. You either moved on, or you moved out. Richard Trevithick pioneered the development of high-pressure steam engines at the beginning of the nineteenth century, applying them in locomotives, vehicles and ships. At the time none of these contraptions were called for, for the social infrastructure was devoted to exploiting horses on land or sail at sea. Horseless carriages and locomotives were viewed with the disdain reserved for uninvited guests. What was significant here, as with any form of progress, is that there has to be an overwhelming economic advantage for the switch to occur. In the last century, what delayed adoption of electric (or hybrid) cars was the oil industry lobby, and in every case ~ whether at the level of the individual or of society ~ people generally have to be panicked into change by some crisis imposed from outside. Sadly war is normally the most effective. If the boat had failed in Brussels, I did not want its successor the hydroplane to have failed in Glasgow. Although it had desirable aerodynamic characteristics, these were unlikely to be achieved except at high speed. A parallel could be drawn with hovercraft, for unless there is sufficient power to fill the skirts then they will not operate at all. (Wheeled vehicles do not always share the disadvantage ~ a Bentley still works when it

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is rolling down a hill.) When I looked back at progress in Scotland, it could be put into some sort of perspective. I had not only confirmed the versatility of the profile, but I had rendered it in machinereadable form as well. I had established which materials to use and precisely how they could be assembled, and I had seen that the market favoured the introduction of ground-effect types, as had been amply proven in the USA. The way ahead still required me to fabricate, float and fly foams in one form or another. July however concluded the ‘product definition’ phase. I would henceforth use a single thickness and type of foam and put together something like the craft in the picture below, though without the stub wings that the illustrator had included to suit his fancy. This required only five panels of foam, and the varieties of PVC I discovered around this time seemed the obvious springboard for future progress. Although I had originally been committed to producing both of the types that appeared in the patent documents ~ both the hydroplane and the aeroplane ~ once outward circumstances had forced my hand, the first was obviously the more realistic route to market. I knew it floated, though whether the other flew was still anybody’s guess:

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FOAM (eN)COre 13 August 2006 23:18:01 BST hi Colin, bad news I am afraid that the model is highly unstable due to the top heavy engine, the weight would have to be below the centre of the fuselage to get any chance of stable flight, I would suggest a re think on the design, as the two front fuselage sheets simply rip apart on acceleration, I would not recommend you attempt any full size manned test flight, I hope I have been of help, and good luck with your project, regards gary That for the time being, was where I would leave the surface-skimming aircraft, but it had got to the point anyway when I had to leave off narrative and start with implementation. Henceforth I would devote more time to publicising these ideas by every means possible. That point was August of 2006, when I had the leisure to survey the wreckage of my life. It had been four years since I had first entertained the notion that cars could not only be made to float but that they should first be persuaded to fly near the surface. Dictators like Five Year Plans as a means of mapping progress, but essentially such plans involve the implementation of known arts from elsewhere; so the collectivisation of farming in Soviet Russia owed much to individual mechanical enterprise on the prairies of America. Such schemes often produce great benefits ~ the lunar space programme was a collectively planned enterprise that brought us Clingfilm, although we have to remember we already had kitchen foil. Schemes of this kind improve rather than invent things, while individual

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obsessions proceed more serendipitously altogether, and by this measure perhaps I had not done so badly. I had learned much about product development in general, and here are my five rules for success. There were four, but it did not sound nearly so neat. They were Seek, Search, Simplify, Sustain and Sell. Seek the benefit in everything you do, for reversals in fortune were instructive ~ I went in for thinner foams only when forced by circumstance. Search your options continuously ~ I discovered foams by chance and PVC only later. Simplify, for simple products are easier to shift in every way. Sustain, for the summit cannot always be seen and Sell every aspect, for having something to show always beats nothing. The intellectual property protection meanwhile had taken off more quickly than the boat. The money had run out; I had spent upwards of twenty thousand pounds and owed half as much again in taxes. I was left with UK and PCT patent applications, and a design registration in Europe that described the profile of my beloved ‘blades’. Now that I was committed to the hydroplane, which was closer to my original vision, I registered it myself as a design in the UK to accompany the trademark. And then there was always the domain name, probably the single most cost-effective intellectual piece of real estate that I had pitched my spade upon. There was this book too, I supposed, and the dubious value of its copyright ~ though I had read a book called The Long Tail that described how if you archived any sort of content on the internet, then some sad individual somewhere would look at it. And another, Fooled by Randomness said it was better in this connected world to have a small band of regular

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FOAM (eN)COre enthusiasts to carry the torch than any number of armchair types who might accidentally drop it. This one is for you, dudes. Therefore this book opens with a reproduction of UK registered design 3 014 418 that shows the outline of my flying car, with its two wing surfaces bounded by a pair of buoyant sides, and it closes with a more practical embodiment that nonetheless bears a strong family resemblance, in design number 3 025 609. It would be no surprise if I told you that the first required the one per cent inspiration and the second the ninety nine per cent perspiration. If it has not yet been floated in reality, it is more than ready enough to float on the internet. Its construction almost precisely reflects the trend in model aeroplanes, and others have shown that similar outlines at a much smaller scale are able to fly freely. Nobody else has yet demonstrated that highspeed craft can be produced by 2-D methods at full scale or that foam panels were meant to fly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the panel plane:

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APPeNdIx I ~ skIMMING GuIde Whilst looking up a design of my own on the net, I came upon one registered as recently as 2005 by someone living in Wolverhampton, so there are at least two of us out there. Obviously these ideas are encroaching upon public consciousness, which is half the battle. The people at Toyota won’t be choking on their cappuccino, but the elements are all in the right places:

It all began in the Twentieth century, when the internal combustion engine allowed both cars and aircraft to develop. At the same time boats began to ‘plane’ or drive themselves out of the water at speed and rest on top. As a result they were modified with a flatter rear surface to benefit from this ‘hydrodynamic’ lift. Very little surface contact is required at speed and this led Glenn Curtis, who with the Wright Brothers perfected the aeroplane, to patent the ‘hydroplane’ around the same time. In the 1930s hydroplanes universally adopted a ‘three-point’ configuration with two forward

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APPeNdIx I ~ skIMMING GuIde sponsons and the propeller at the rear being the only points of contact. The design actually stemmed from fitting water-skis experimentally to a more conventional hull. The flat undersides of hydroplanes, raised on the sponsons at speed, have always been designed to trap air and add aerodynamic lift to the equation; to prevent too much of this many now have tailplanes to control the ‘trim’ or attitude of the craft. Multi-hulled powerboats now share the benefit of what used to be called ‘ground-effect’ but is now often called ‘surface­ effect’ lift, although they trap air between more conventional ‘V’ hulls that slice through the waves rather more easily. WIG craft (or Wing-In-Ground-effect) take the process a stage further and generally feature stub wings that provide sufficient lift to raise the craft a little way clear of the surface, a bit like a swan struggling to take off. The challenge has been to stabilise these in flight, for as the craft approaches the surface the air stacks up toward the rear of the underside, concentrates the lift there and tips the nose in like a barrow; moving further from the surface has the opposite effect. The solution has invariably been either a tandem wing or a stabiliser higher up at the rear of the craft where it is more immune from these effects and is able to control the ‘ride-height’. Getting the dynamics quite right can be a painful process in more ways than one, and the Panel Plane is designed as an experimental platform that operates variously as a sled, catamaran, hydroplane and surface skimmer. If you throw enough mud at a wall, you can expect some of it to stick….

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APPeNdIx II ~ LINks My own contribution to all of this cannot be overestimated, well it probably could, but then I do not expect anyone else out there to blow my trumpet, especially not for free. Do bookmark panelplane.com for at some point it will include more than free advertising for my ISP. The average life of a website is only thirty days, so I may well not call upon your attention for long. The expression ‘google’ has now been trademarked, so I suggest you goggle the following: APT123 for CNC cutting Autoworld for Europe’s best collection of cars Brett Budden Patterns Colin McLeod Designs DIAB, Gurit and Trident Foams Ekranoplans, Flareboats and Flarecraft Harrison Goddard Foote patent agents Hirth and RCV engines Microlink PC Ratio Business Services RYA for boating

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APPeNdIx II ~ LINks Scottish Maritime, Motorboat and Koc Museums Summersdale Publishers UK Patent Office, online chicanery like my own West System and SP System epoxies Wikipedia on everything workingmodel.co.uk

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APPeNdIx III ~ PANeL PLANs The panel plane is a two-bladed catamaran with planing edges, steps, risers and tail fins that are created by a template suited to standard stock. Five foam panels with dimensions of 1220 x 2400 mm are required for construction: one for each blade, another for a boxsection chassis and one for both upper and lower deck. The chassis bridges the blades and provides a basis for upper and lower surfaces, which together form an aerofoil section. Foams that are suitable include SAN, PVC or PU core in thicknesses from 5 to 15 mm, with densities around 60 to 90 kg/cubic metre. All three are compatible with either polyester or epoxy resins, which are used to seal the surfaces AFTER assembly, so that all joins benefit from foam-foam contact. Panels may be fibre-reinforced either side before or after cutting (woven cloths are available at up to 1200 mm as well). If the panels are sawn then wastage is negligible, but for routers a template with outside dimensions of 1200 x 2400 mm allows for the thickness of the cutting tool. Jigsaw blades are of sufficient length to cut two panels together, so that the sides of the craft are truly identical. Begin by marking out one panel with a centrally placed ‘prow’ section, bound by identical ‘fillets’. The narrow end of each fillet is 20 cm and the broad end 60 cm. The prow template is inset by 40 cm from one end of the panel and is rounded off with a circle 10 cm diameter. Draw this first, and use a lath to trace the progressive curves that form the prow at a tangent to the circle. The graduation of each curve should be similar, but need not be exactly so:

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APPeNdIx III ~ PANeL PLANs

Once the blades are cut, make sure to mark the corresponding parts so that if there is any asymmetry between the upper and lower edges of each blade, then at least they will match after final assembly:

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Taking these matched parts, create the ‘fin-and-fillet’ pairing that will form the rear half of each of the blades:

After each of the rear sections is complete, the blades can be conjoined at this stage. Unless they are made of a double thickness of foam and lap-jointed to some extent, the break in the middle will be vulnerable to failure until conjoined to the chassis. Dowelling or skinning the material with e.g. chopped strand matting is a means to bind the parts together at the expense of additional weight:

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APPeNdIx III ~ PANeL PLANs Any mismatch between the depth (80 cm) of the blunt end of the prow section and the combined depth of the fin-and-fillet section appears as a notch along the upper edge of each blade, which can nonetheless be smoothed out. In instances where the full width of the panel has been used (1220 mm), or when templates have been worked manually, then the situation is normal:

The third panel should be divided into six ‘planks’ of 40 cm each. Four of these should be glued together like a box girder, whose edges are simply abutted so that the cross-section of the ‘box’ is slightly wider than it is deep. The ends of this sub-assembly remain open for the moment, which allows for the inside joins to be glued as well. Afterward two further planks are used to terminate the box section so that they form crossmembers that span the blades. Omitted from the photograph below, the remaining planks are used as longitudinal blocks that square the chassis off and provide an extensive facing surface to adhere to each blade. (The ‘lid’ is also omitted from this prototype as we were not too sure of the details at this stage):

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You will notice that the picture shows a stabiliser too; this is absent from the craft and the tail fins should be braced with bow-spars instead, unless you intend to go flying. Of course all of these parts are interchangeable and the topside of the box section could be sacrificed to this end, but doing so could result in severe injury, death or the loss of Aunt Matilda’s inheritance when she hears you have been so stupid. At this juncture many people say to me, ‘But Master, where to locate our chassis?’ Looking at the one above, we went for a high and forward position, although I have since changed my mind. That’s my prerogative. (These things are very finely balanced around the heel and I did not want it tipping on to its tail.) For the maximum structural integrity however my personal preference is to pitch the chassis exactly halfway up the blades i.e. 20 cm clearance top and bottom and exactly half way along the total length of the craft. You may find when you do this that the lower edge of the rear portion of the chassis appears just

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APPeNdIx III ~ PANeL PLANs below the lower line of each riser. If it does, adjust. This isn’t rocket science. You will want to have fitted half-inch plywood or similar to either side of the rear transom and studs in support of whichever outboard motor you envisage, before sealing the centre-section up. Likewise if you wish to fix studs or brackets in support of either a seat for the driver or a mount for an aero-engine, then this may also be a good time, before upper and lower panels are secured. The trailing edge of each of these is coincident with the transom at the rear and they should be fixed in the first instance so that they lay more or less level, until such time as the adhesive is cured. Use of adhesive can be complemented with brass screws and resin in the form of ‘plugs’. Once the panels are fitted in this way they can be flexed so that they meet at a point toward the forward end ~ ideally this should be done in the warmth, as foams can generally be thermoformed. The apex where these edges meet is now stressed and has to be joined for example by a zip or buckles; alternatively they can be clamped while the borders are glued. You may wish to run a tie-rod through each side of the craft so to secure the blades at the bow and to hold each of these panels in place at the same time. You should now have something that looks eerily like the model pictured below:

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(Of course this one is a model, although the techniques are workable at every scale). The resulting craft, as you can imagine, is around 4.40 metres in length and 1.30 metres wide. One advantage of the technique is that it holds for even bigger structures for which panels have first to be laminated together in a ‘super-panel’ before construction begins. This is where it begins to get expensive. The craft is experimental and you may wish to comment upon improvements. This narrative is an overview of the methods involved and not a definitive guide to construction, so it offers no guarantee of structural integrity. Use of such craft risks severe injury and death and is discouraged by the manufacturers. But it is not going to stop me.

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APPeNdIx III ~ PANeL PLANs

Design no. 3 025 609

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Now read ‘Final Call’ by the same author ~ everything you did not want to know about the airline industry.

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