Portent

Fifty years ago, the first hovercraft was invented here in the UK. I travelled on a commercial one in 1976 between England and France. It was fun and fast apart from the rough weather then.

Now, this project Steam Boat Willy, named presumably after the first Walt Disney Mickey Mouse Cartoon is a hand built leg powered hovercraft. You can see the video is action and read about the technical details. I remember as a kid seeing small one person hovercraft on TV and wanting one; this may be the next best thing.

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There’s a technique called dynamic soaring that birds particularly Albatrosses use to harvest energy from places where winds are changing such as in wave troughs.

Gliders use the same technique and radio controlled gliders in this video, to get up to a speed according to the radar gun of 399 MPH. Call me a little skeptical but are model gliders structurally able to go that fast without over stressing the wings? Certainly one or two of the comments suggest the same. Anyway you make your mind up!

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I used to love making paper air planes so this idea, although it has been done is still interesting enough for me to feature it and maybe somebody else will see this and run with it.

A balloon filled with helium gas took a payload up to 122,000 feet before bursting and releasing 100 paper planes each with a Samsung SD memory card. It was a bit of a publicity gimmick for Samsung to prove how tough their cards are.

The planes were found in the following countries. Germany, The Netherlands, California (USA), Canada and South Africa. Even better (as far as I’m concerned!), the paper planes look as if they are my favourite design. I learnt it as a kid and it’s vastly superior to the humble paper dart which is IMHO unbalanced.

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So if you get a high def video camera safely mounted in a protective Styrofoam box and attached to a balloon. There’s also a tracker in the box and a parachute to bring it down safely.

This is the 4th BEAR (Balloon Experiments with Amateur Radio) and the first one with high def video. Would you travel to a foreign country (whose language you don’t speak) then buy a video camera and send it up aloft? That’s what the guy who provided the video camera did!

I love this sort of stuff; spirit of adventure etc. Sending a balloon up high will always lead to its demise because the air thins and eventually the gas inside has too high a pressure difference. The photo is from the Youtube video when the balloon burst; that’s what you can see! Fascinating Stuff!

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Another relaxation of the “no commercial websites” rule. (Given that so many websites, including portent carry adverts its also a bit of a loose restriction!). I’ve always liked classic aircraft though most featured here are well before my time.

Classic Flight, part of the Air Atlantique group offers flights on classic aircraft as well as hiring out aircraft for films, air displays, training etc. Though they have a large range of aircraft- including the first British Jet Fighter the Meteor, the flights are limited to a DC 3 (Dakota), a Devon, Twin Pioneer, de Havilland Dragon Rapide and a Percival Prentice. I’d imagine getting insurance to take commercial passengers in anything else, like military jets would be prohibitive in price, if it all possible.

They have a fascinating range of aircraft, many ex military and many made by British firms. I used to work at British Aerospace in the 1990s and once saw a family tree of companies that merged. Nearly every British aircraft manufacturing company ended up in British Aerospace, just as every British car company (near enough) ended up in British Leyland.

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