Category: Uncategorized

The Value of Public Service

In praise of public life[1]. That sound like such a strange sentence to utter about this last week. It’s been local election week. First Thursday in May is traditionally the day of elections in the UK.

It’s good to say that a political life is a positive. I’d say most councillors elected in this crop are motivated by the simple idea of public service. Yes, a lot of them will have completely different understanding as to what that means but there’s a general desire to make life better.

Naturally, there are the exceptions. That is those people who are ideologues, intent on imposing their views on people regardless of rational belief or any basic understanding of how the world works. Yes, I am talking about the blip that is the current results for the Reform Party. Blip it is. Like it or not, the turnout for local elections is sadly unimpressive.

Party politics is in jeopardy. I’ve nothing to object to politicians who take an independent line. It’s often those individuals who cross boundaries and unravel roadblocks to stop a stasis descending over a political assembly. A council chamber full of sheep helps no one.

To command popular support a practical political party must be a board church. We have a common expectation that decision-making forums be made up of our peer group. It’s embedded in the jury system. If decision-making in the public realm becomes so disconnected from everyday life, then respect is lost. However, if ever changing newspaper headlines drive governance – well, you get my point.

I say, conventional Party politics is in jeopardy because popularism is distorting the playing field. If a political Party becomes a rabble-rousing creature that sits on the backs of the electorate, then no good will come of it. That’s especially true when issues pursued are nothing much to do with the remit of a Council.

My prediction is that the new Reform councillors will soon get locked into lots of noisy arguments over issues that bypass the things that need to be done in each locality. No fixing potholes or planting trees when meaningless debates about “woke” can be had. No improving recycling achievements or properly funding care provisions. No building affordable housing or cleaning up waterways.

For political leaders and parties to regain respect and support there needs to be less communication about the possible ways and means and more about what’s been done. Populism takes over when people become fed-up with endless jam tomorrow arguments. The cycle of empty promises feeds the demigods.

My advice. Even if it’s just one pothole is fixed – tell people.

[1] Book Title – In Praise of Public Life : the Honor and Purpose of Political Science

Embracing Uncertainty

Daily writing prompt
Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.
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Best time to get a job is when you already have one. One of life’s conundrums. If you need work, it’s not so easy to find. If you already have work opportunities spring up. This phenomenon is strangely true in my experience.

It’s those situations where I’m doing something I enjoy and getting reasonably well paid for it. Then there’s an urge to see scan around to see what potential next steps there are out there.

It’s not extreme risk taking. It’s a risk, nevertheless. Throwing aside a comfortable and rewarding position for a much greater degree of uncertainty. Especially when going from a job with no end date to one that offered a five-year contact with only a vague possibility of renewal. Not only that but going to a start-up organisation that was not entirely guaranteed to thrive. Facing the fact that some people would have been happy if it hadn’t succeeded.

I did it. No regrets. In fact, in retrospect it was the high point of my professional career.

Plug and sigh

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Weird, I know. My first thought as I looked across my tatty desk. Cables are irritating. Even the alternative is irritating. Tapping away at this keyboard I’m tied by a slim black wire that runs off into a darkened place. If I had a wireless keyboard, I’d be doubly irritated. Sure, as eggs are eggs the battery would not be charged when I needed it to be charged. And I would have put the battery charger away in a box and forgotten where I’d put it.

They’re everywhere. Cables and connectors. This could be the century of the cable, much a the last one. Dam things are cash cows too. Companies like to extract the maximum consideration out of us. Our fantastically capable new tech is useless unless we dip into our pockets and buy cables with just the right connector[1].

Fine, there have been attempts to overcome this bond we have with wires. Wireless charging and wireless connections don’t always deliver what they say on the box. They can be as much faff as plugging in cables. Physics dictates those energetic electrons like conductors. When power is needed, travelling faster and further through wires. Whizzing along with the potential to do work wherever they end up.

If I take the bigger picture, the situation is not so simple. Wires dedicated to communication are going out of fashion. Once upon a time copper wires brough the telephone into the house. Now, that communication is optical. Light flashes to the tune of the ones and noughts we seek.

Getting power from A to B, storing it and using it as needed, there lies unending challenges. From the mega to the micro level. Controversies about huge electricity pylons straddling the countryside. To powering the lean electronics hidden in the plastic case of my keyboard.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of wires. And danced the earth on laughter-powered things.

To borrow a poetic line on flying[2]. If only we could loose this bond forever. Unlikely as it seems. In my profession we contend with the fact that civil aircraft, where lightness equals profit, there’s between 100 and 200 miles of wires.

Let’s think. Will this be perpetual? Put aside all the steps that machines may advance, at some level they come down to wires and multiple connections. In a way, lucky for us. That means there will always be an off switch.

[1] https://newsthump.com/2018/05/21/man-decides-to-keep-box-of-cables-hes-has-since-2002-for-another-year/

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7

God, what next?

It’s Sunday. A day of reflection. A day when mentioning God might not be too controversial. Naturally, I might not do that in a conventional way. A train of though linking one or two events.

If I go back to my school days. Don’t worry it’s what happens when you click 65. Foolish reminiscences of day that are falling into the history books. Yes, when the 1970s are history. In the true sense of the word. Now, erudite historians chew over the earth-shattering events of my childhood. I didn’t know until this week that the Kennedy shooting in the US coincided with an event relevant to my growing-up. Adventures in space and time. The first broadcast of Dr Who.

Before I digress too much, what I was thinking about was a teacher. Johnny Rayworth. I’m unsure about the spelling of his surname name but you get the idea. To a class of misbehaving boys, his retort was: “God’s on my side. Clarence” Basically, don’t be silly boy you have no agency in my classroom. He called everyone Clarence. I suspect because he couldn’t remember names or there was some association that is lost in the mists of time.

He was one of several war years teachers at my school. This portly gentleman had a wooden leg. His subject – technical drawing. It seems remarkable in 2025 that boys were taught drawing 50-years ago. It did me no harm. My first job was in an engineering drawing office.

Evoking God as a way of saying this is good. That’s got a lot of mileage. Because the BBC like to do reminiscence too, I have a catchy lyric running through my head this morning. “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” gets repeated over and over. A simple song that started life in 1973 with a British rock band called “Argent”. They are long forgotten. Their legacy is an undeniable example of good works. The world is a better place for an uplifting song or two.

The internet is full of a lifetime of Groucho Marx quotes. The man was a master of the one liner. As an American comedian a lot of his lines sum-up the American experience but there’s a universality to them too.

This last week, however generous my thinking I’m inclined to say that we can all take generosity beyond its limits. Like the man says: “Be open minded, but not so open minded that your brains fall out.” As much as a few may say that the international trade tariff avalanche is a long-term attempt to do good in the US, the evidence points to a collective act of brains falling out.

There’s an abundance of Trump memes scattered about social media. The one I like the most this week is here.

Key Milestones in Safety Management

One chunk of a recalling of the path civil aviation has taken in the last 40-years is called: Safety Management Systems (SMS). It’s a method or set of methods that didn’t arrive fully formed. It can easy be assumed that a guru with a long white beard stormed out of his quiet hermitage to declare a eureka moment. No such thing happened.

Through every part of my engineering design career the importance of reliability and quality systems was evident. Codified, procedural and often tedious. Some say the quality movement had its origins in the world of the 1960s moonshot and the advent of nuclear weapons. I don’t think there’s a single spring from which the thinking flows.

That said, there are notable minds that shaped the development of standardised quality systems. Acknowledging that the Deming Cycle[1] is core component doesn’t take too much of a leap. It’s a simple idea for capturing the idea of continuous improvement. Aerospace design and production organisations adopted this method readily.

Those first steps were all about the Q word, Quality. How to deliver a product that reliably worked to specification. At the time the S word, Safety wasn’t spoken of in the same way. There had been an underlying presumption that quality success led to safety success. However, this was not entirely true. An aerospace product can leave a factory 100% compliant with a pile of requirements, specifications and tests only to subsequently reveal failing and weaknesses in operational service.

In the saddest of cases those failing and weaknesses were discovered because of formal accident or incident investigation. In civil aviation these are conducted independently. Worldwide accident investigators and aircraft operators often detected a lack of learning from past events. This situation stimulated activities aimed at accident prevention.

In 1984, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) published the first edition of its Accident Prevention Manual. This document introduced concepts and methods aimed at accident prevention. It was a pick and mix of initiatives and processes gleamed from the best-known practices of the time.

One of the jobs I had on joining the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Safety Regulation Group (SRG) was to work with the ICAO secretariate on an update to the Accident Prevention Manual (Doc 9422). The UK CAA has long been an advocate and early adopter of occurrence reporting and flight monitoring. Both were seen as key means to prevent aviation accidents.

It was envisaged that a second edition of the manual would be available in 2001. That didn’t happen. Instead, ICAO decided to harmonise information available on safety and put that into one manual. At that point safety information was scattered around the various ICAO Annexes. Thus, the content of the Accident Prevention Manual was consolidated into the Safety Management Manual (SMM) (Doc 9859). This new document was first published in 2006.

There’s much more to say since the above is merely a quick snapshot.

[1] https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/

Don’t forget your towel

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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Excursions into the improbable. It’s the way that people look at life that reveals the absurdity of existence. We are highly improbable beings and that’s best approached with humour.

I’m not all that original. I’m going to celebrate the HHGTTG[1]. When it was first broadcast, I clung to the radio, wondering what imaginative excursion it would take us on next. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of abstract ideas that surround a wacky plot.

Why is it funny? Radio has a wonderful way of forming pictures in the mind. The creation of Zaphod Beeblebrox takes a bit of getting one’s head around. Notice what I did there? Such a mad romp of absurdity opens huge vistas of comic horizons. Cosmic even.

[1] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction created by Douglas Adams.

Hovercraft Travel

Inventions full of promise. In the 1950s a British inventor seemed to have a solution to a lot of transport problems. How to travel at speed over a variety of surfaces. Christopher Cockerell, like so many inventors of the past, had difficulty in convincing people of the usefulness of his invention. He persisted and the commercial Hovercraft was born.

It’s not that traveling on a cushion of air had never been considered before. It’s more a question of the fact that it took until the 20th century for all the components (engines and materials) to become available to make a practical vehicle.

It’s not a boat. It’s not a plane. It’s an air-cushion vehicle. Underlying this is the question of who takes responsibility for these vehicles? I know this with reference to those who I have worked with over the years. In the 1990s, it was the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) that issued a Certificate of Airworthiness for these craft. Today, they are addressed under marine regulation.

The backward and forward of the arguments as to what a “Hovercraft” is defined as, surprisingly goes on at length. It’s flexibility in being able to rapidly traverse water and land without alteration is an asset but a minefield for lawyers[1].  

Yesterday, I took the passenger Hovercraft service between Southsea (Portsmouth) and the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight. It’s the fastest way to get from the mainland to the island. 10 minutes across the water.

This for me was to revisit a trip that I often made in the 1990s. I’d drive down from London Gatwick early in the morning. Try to fit a breakfast in before taking an early Hovercraft across to the Isle of Wight. Memories of arriving at a desolate car park in the cold and wet stuck. There I’d be picked up and ferried to Britten-Norman[2] for the day. The Britten-Norman aircraft company had its headquarters in Bembridge.

Although the Islander is a small aircraft its owners liked to equip it with an array of different modifications. My job was the approval of modifications. All done, at the time, under British Civil Airworthiness Requirements (BCARs).  It was one overseas mission I enjoyed a lot.

[1] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1968/may/16/hovercraft-bill

[2] https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/islander-aircraft-production-restarts-on-isle-of-wight/

Local Wildlife

I’m wondering – what is the definition of a marsh? This has been a wet February. It’s now passed having left water, water everywhere. Put my Wellington boots on, and underfoot a squidgy noise comes from the waterlogged ground.

On the plus side, saturated fields are great for the local wildlife. Not so great for simply walking. It’s a season of mud and trodden down grass. Puddles and soggy pools. The water weaves its way through a boggy marsh. It spreads out in a minor flood, covering sedges and fence poles. There’s that word again – marsh. Still wetland.

That said, so many English marshes have been drained to create fertile agricultural land. Over decades fields have been “improved” by engineering drainage to turn swamps into workable farmlands. Sometimes with limited success in the winter.

I grew up on Horsington Marsh. The name that lives on. It’s farmed grassland with much of it liable to annual flooding. A clay valley of marshland formed between a winding brook and a temperamental river. Bow Brook and the River Cale. Both these eventually met up with the River Stour and head on down to the coast in Dorset.

Now, I live looking out on the lower part of the River Lambourn. In shape and form are totally different from the Cale or Stour. The Lambourn is shallow and fast flowing. It’s a chalk river that’s normally crystal clear. Locally, it does spillover into the fields. It’s a superficial flood that soaks riverbank.

The River Lambourn Special Area of Conservation (SAC) is a protected site[1]. Which means that there’s plenty of information on the wildlife habitat and the threats to the river. One of the biggest threats to the river is a water company. Thames Water storm overflows discharge into the river. It makes me wonder what it means to be a protected site.

The river has many different fish species. Most of all the Trout and some Grayling. Feasting on these we have Herons and Egrets. This week, I was surprised to see a large Cormorant[2] high up in a tree, wings spread, enjoying the morning sunshine.

So, however marshy the rising ground water and overflowing river might make it, there’s nature just outside the back door.

[1] https://www.westberks.gov.uk/article/41082/River-Lambourn-Special-Area-of-Conservation-SAC

[2] https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/cormorant

Toronto Regional Jet

The bubbling cauldron of social media is overflowing with comments on the regional jet crash in Toronto. So, far 2025 is starting as 2005. After a period when aviation safety results were admirably good, we now enter a period when events conspire to show us that we should never take aviation safety for granted. Obviously, the question gets asked – is this a statistical blip or is something more concerning happening?

As would be expected the Canadian air accident investigators are gathering data. No doubt there will be preliminary reports. Much evidence is available to help the air accident investigators determine probable cause. This evidence available includes a plethora of video footage. The ubiquity of the mobile phone has led to a situation where videos circulate on social media before they get into the hands of professional investigators.

Speculation on this major accident ranges from the Trumpian – I saw a video therefore I know what happened to the more considered comments about how well the cabin crew did in evacuating the broken aircraft under horrendous conditions.

Certainly, the landing appears to have been a hard one. The weather condition, as seen on the pictures doing the rounds, was windy but not stormy in the sense of poor visibility. Snow cleared from the runway. Surrounded by a landscape of white.

Luckly the aircraft slid down the main runway. That dissipated energy to an extent that most passengers were not badly hurt and therefore able to escape the wreckage. Another fortuitous part of the sequence of events was the absence of a fire at the time of evacuation.

I need to be careful in using the word – fortuitous. The investigators will put together the exact sequence of events but there’s no doubt in my mind that credit should be given to the good design of the aircraft. Generally, accidents and serious incidents are more survivable that people might initially think. This is NOT simple luck. Although, for individuals’ luck may play a part in their fate.

Structures and Cabin safety experts spend their working lives thinking about the – what ifs. The objectives set for aircraft designs maximise the opportunities for survival. Cabin crew can fly for a lifetime and never experience a catastrophic event. When they do their training kicks in, and lives are saved. My thanks are to all those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that aviation safety isn’t taken for granted. Those who do the serious business.

POST: Agreed. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/20/us/flight-attendants-safety-plane-crash/index.html

Challenges Facing Supersonic Flight

Congratulations go to “Boom” for their supersonic jet flight[1]. Civil aerospace hasn’t ventured into this space for some time. Breaking the sound barrier is not an everyday occurrence in the civil world. There may be an international market for such new aircraft as much as there’s a market for fast cars and expensive boats.

However, I do not think a supersonic flight is the future of civil aerospace. It’s not mainstream. The environmental objectives for the future of aviation are ambitious. Generally, that means getting people from A to B in as clean and efficient a manner as is feasible. That does not include going ever faster and faster.

This new aircraft type is likely to be solely made in America. So, it does fit with the current political direction of the administration in the US. A triumph of technology. President Trump’s instinct to get rid of rules and regulations may work in the favour of Boom. However, in the end, the deciding factor will be – will the international marketplace want such a new aircraft type?

I certainly recall amazing ambition of the people who brought us the Eclipse aircraft[2]. Small light jets were going to be everywhere. Like a Silicon Valley revolution for the aerospace industries. That didn’t happen as predicted because the economics didn’t stack up. I don’t recall rules and regulations being the problem.

Even so, BOOM technology will have a hard job meeting international safety and environmental standards. I seem to remember that’s not new for supersonic flight. Even if the advancements made improve noise performance, there’s emissions and contrails to ponder.

There is another consideration too. It’s the problem Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is facing now. To capitalise on their capabilities, these aircraft technologies require the reorganisation (modernisation) of national airspace. Plus, agreement at international level[3].

Supersonic flight over the world’s oceans may get agreement. Supersonic flight over national territory is a much harder sell. Some fliers may pay to slashing their travel times on-route. Going round and round in a stack, waiting to land, with conventional aircraft all around, will soon dispel any excitement.

Good luck to Boom. If civil use is minimal, no doubt defence applications will be numerous.

[1] https://boomsupersonic.com/

[2] https://www.eclipse.aero/about/

[3] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Pages/default.aspx