International Globetrotters

Posted on 9 November 2012 by SJPONeill

Round round get around
We get around
Yeah
Get around round round we get around
we get around
Get around round round we get around
From town to town
Get around round round we get around
We’re a real cool head
Get around round round we get around

Cheers to the Beach Boys for those opening words…

Just popped into the inbox…always good to see local lads doing well…the full update is in the Hawkeye UAV web site but I’ve taken the liberty of posting up the ISR-focused highlights below…this is cutting edge Kiwi technology, both in the aircraft technology and the imagery processing methodology…don’t forget that the processed imagery shown is actually a 3D model – very cool….and more so when you consider the size of the airframe doing the work….all images and text below © Hawkeye UAV…

At the end of September David and I departed Auckland, complete with UAV and cold weather kit, bound for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We arrived late Sunday night, to spend a week conducting tasks that included surveying an open cast coalmine in the North of the country. Our host company MonMap took very good care of us and had made all internal arrangements for our stay and operations.

Mongolia is a really interesting place, mineral rich, particularly in copper and coal. They have a young democracy born from the departure of Soviet control in 1989 at the time when the Iron Curtain was falling. The legacy of Soviet rule is plain to see in Ulaanbaatar, particularly in its architecture. That said, the obvious Western influence has definitely taken root in new business and development, and the culture of the city dwellers. The predominantly Buddhist, Mongolian people are very open and friendly, fiercely patriotic and proud of their heritage and in particular their iconic founding father and conquering hero, Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. His face is immortalised everywhere on statues, monuments, Vodka bottles and at least three kinds of very good local beer. The capital’s international airport is of course named after him too.

Ulaanbaatar City

On Tuesday we travelled north via road to Sharyn Gol, a coal mining facility with a population of nearly 10,000 in the adjacent village. Sharyn Gol was a former Soviet mine and the apartment blocks, main buildings and much of the legacy equipment remain.

Wednesday dawned overcast and with little wind initially which was an encouraging sign for the beginning of flight operations. We had divided the whole facility into three flight areas, 1) The old and current open mines, 2) The steppes, railhead and facilities and 3) the village and outlying buildings.

Sharyn Gol mine HQ building, railhead and facilities

Mining equipment

Sharyn Gol coalmine

Throughout the morning the wind rose steadily and by the time we launched for our first sortie we were experiencing some good crosswind gusts in excess of 30 km per hour. We conducted the flight as planned, with encouraging approval from the MonMap guys, a team of whom had laid out and very quickly tagged GPS markers for our ground control. We had set up on the South rim of the pit clear of all mining operations and traffic, operating from out the back of MonMap’s Landcruiser. The flight duration was 72 minutes and we captured over 1,100 images. Recovery was routine, with the Hawk landing within 10 metres of our designated recovery spot. Indicated wind gusts were registering as high as 47 km per hour and were blowing straight in off the Siberian plains. Jackets and hats were the order of the day! The AreoHawk took it all in stride.

After lunch we prepared for the next flight, launching from the South rim still, but further East this time, closer to our target area. With more runs being conducted into and downwind, speed control and camera firing interval were of particular importance. Our ability to adjust track, speed and turn radius on the fly, rather than relying on preplanned waypoints, comes into its own in these scenarios. Despite the variable and strongly gusting winds, the task and subsequent recovery went smoothly and the Hawk landed within 20 metres of its programmed landing point. Flight time was once again over 70 minutes long with in excess of 1,000 photos captured.

With the ever increasing wind and failing light we decided to conduct the final flight the next morning. On the completion of Wednesday’s flying I started processing the imagery from flight 1, the mine.

AreoHawk 02 in MonMap livery

Parachute deployment, flight 1

About to touch down

Thursday morning was bright and sunny (and not as cold!). With good light quite early we launched immediately after breakfast from an area North of the mine, within our target area. This time we were operating adjacent to the foothills and the village lay stretched out on an incline, requiring David (on the controls for this sortie) to carefully manage acquisition altitude and terrain avoidance for the duration of the flight. Being so close to the housing area and the schools we soon drew a steady stream of onlookers and curious folk keen to have a look at our operation and pose for photos with us and the UAV.

While the wind did once again grow in strength throughout the morning to over 30 km per hour it had little impact on the flight, which went very smoothly and was over 80 minutes in duration. One of the main objectives of surveying the village and populated areas was to provide MonMap with a dataset for cadastral boundary and feature extraction. The resulting product is very good and more than suitable for this purpose, especially with the GPS control applied.

Parachute hatch just popping on final recovery in Mongolia

Having completed flying operations and surveying more than a combined 12 square kilometres (3,000 acres) across the three completed flights we packed our stuff and headed back to Ulaanbaatar. This gave us the opportunity to get into some imagery processing in the office, and to play tourist a bit.

Overall the results from the Mongolia flights have been outstanding. We captured a lot of imagery on each sortie, with very strong overlap. Both the point clouds and the orthophotos are extremely pleasing. Working with MonMap was outstanding and we look forward to our return to their country next year to deliver systems and training, and for the odd Chinggis Gold lager. Results video here.

Orthophoto mosaic result sample

Digital Elevation Model generated from the dense point cloud

Mine orthophotos draped over terrain model

South Africa:

In September, Andre Henrico of Aeroscan Aerial Survey, South Africa, attended training in New Zealand on his new AreoHawk. A seasoned UAV professional, Andre has been doing the business from his South African base for many years. Upon his return home he wasted no time getting to work, deploying his new gear on a task in Botswana.

Andre was good enough to send us some photos and share some of his results.

Andre onsite with his AreoHawk preparing to get underway

Recovery

Digital Surface model

Elevation profile superimposed in front of the terrain model

Faster than…

Posted on 2 November 2012 by SJPONeill

Just for perspective, the upload and download speeds here are twice those we were getting with satellite broadband; the ping is almost 20 times faster!!

It doesn’t seem so long that we used to get excited at home when the dial-up download speed got anything over a mighty 6kbps…it’s been our curse to never live (for any period of time anyway) anywhere with fixed line broadband…then, one day early in 2010, the nice folk at Telecom rang up and said we were just inside the coverage for the XT network (after they got ALL the bugs out of it, of course).

Contrary to all the bad press that Telecom gets, they were very nice about it and offered to send out an XT modem for a month’s free trial. Couldn’t say no to that and all of a sudden we were in the world of broadband…not without its issues though: we only had 2Gb a month to play with and the only reception was in one room of the house (fortunately the study: working from home could have become interesting if it had been the bogger!!). XT worked really well for us for almost two years but as I reverted to working more and more from home (the great thing about policy analysis and doctrine review is that you can pretty much do it anywhere), we more and more started to exceed our 2G monthly allowance and the cost started to spiral upwards…

We had been aware of Farmside and its satellite broadband options for a while but hadn’t considered them as cost-effective as the XT option – plus they had (and still do) this annoying habit of answering emails with phone calls which is nice if one is at home but of limited use if one is spending a lot of time away from home and thus not able to answer the phone when it rings…By the end of 2011, though, their satellite and home line bundles were starting to look pretty attractive – the all-up costs were about the same as what we were already paying but the big bonus was a much larger monthly cap albeit with 25 of the 30Gb only being available offpeak between midnight and 2PM – that actually wasn’t too bad as I normally start work at 6AM to catch the back end of the US working day.

Once we established comms – after more email/phone tag – the Farmside sign-up process was swift and efficient and the installer turned up the day after Boxing Day. We would have preferred to have the dish placed further up the wall of the house so that the modem and cables would be out of sight/mind in the loft but still able to wifi through the house…but the installer didn’t come with a long enough ladder (even though we had advised that the wall was pretty high) and we think he may have been a little scared of heights…but the job was soon done and, apart from more lights than the flight deck of Concorde where the modem and router had been placed in the spare room, we achieved another plateau in the quest for decent broadband. The only downer with satellite broadband is that it is high latency – about 800 milliseconds, or the better part of a second – which only meant that pages took a little longer to access and load unless one uses a VPN for work as I do in which case it can be quite frustrating and tiring using a real time mouse and keyboard on pages lagging about a second behind.

Just before I went overseas in September, our phone went off for the day – late in the afternoon, someone claiming to be from Telecom rang and apologised for the disruption of service, attributing it to some errors when our local cabinet was cut into the new fibre network. Fibre? Did someone say fibre? You would think that finding out if we could now access fixed line broadband would be a simple thing mais non…both Farmside and Telecom fobbed us off with “We will tell you when these services are available” responses. To their credit, when we nudged Farmside again after a month or so, they came to the party and advised (after more email/phone tag) that it looked like we could now access proper broadband.

Those living in urban areas will be all “hohum” but these are the things that are important in rural areas where connectivity = communication and the ability to do business from home…the ADSL modem arrived this morning – and didn’t work. Five calls with the really helpful customer service staff (thanks, Chris and Jess) later, we had narrowed the problem down to a modem that had not been configured before it had left the store. All that was easily fixed and by lunch time, it was all up and running, and we were able to kill the Concorde lights in the spare room for the last time. By close of play today, I had been enjoying the rapid response of web pages and had indulged in a long ‘test’ Skype with Rowland from Hawkeye UAV. Now that we have decent 24/7 broadband, we plan on using Skype a lot more and possibly reducing our homeline calling plans – more

So all that thinking and fault locating made me a might peckish….I didn’t quite get the angle right in this picture – I should have reduced the angle so that the whole is silhouetted against the white of the plate – so it doesn’t look as nice as it actually did and certainly not as well as it tasted. All it is is some kumara hash brown mix left over from my kumara and salmon stack the other night, and a chunk of fresh-fried lamb I found in the fridge with a squirt of Carmen’s homemade chili sauce…the curry in the hash brown and the chili sauce blended deliciously…so I made another and it was just as good…

Sitting back now, watching Lost in Space (the original, not the sad-as movie with Joey from Friends) after a great dinner of pork sausages with a cheese omelette….

Humph!! Puny God!!

Posted on 1 October 2012 by SJPONeill

For the first time in a long time, I have done the NZ-Europe trip in one hit instead of stopping over for a night en route – definitely something that I do not intend making a habit of as I am not feeling like the Energiser Bunny at this moment. Still as always, international air travel offers a great opportunity for this rural dweller to catch up with recently released movies…so here we go…

MIB III. Loved this – the first two movies haven’t, in my ever so humble opinion, quite got ‘it’ – no such worries with this third crack at the franchise: I found it thoroughly enjoyable and much more complete and consistent than the previous two iterations. Definitely one for the permanent library.

A few people whined that Thor and Captain America were somewhat unfulfilling and incomplete…while I am not one of those whinynanas, The Avengers certainly grips up and draws together all the strands from Ironman, Hulk (who keeps changing lead actors), Captain America and Thor into a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying action roller-coast. As above, another for the permanent library. The classic line that titles this post comes from The Avengers after Loki attempts to assert his godliness upon the Hulk – short conversation…!

I really enjoyed the Toby Maguire Spiderman trilogy but sorry, dude, this new kid, The Amazing Spiderman, in town knocks you off your perch as the consumate ‘Spidey’ – the best Spiderman movie by far and I’m really pleased to see the hints that there will be sequels to carry on the character development.

I always suspected that there was more to than ‘Honest Abe’ story that met the eye and now the truth all comes out out in a perhaps timely manner in Abe Lincoln: Vampire Killer as the White House is again threatened by the undead (although that’s zombies from eith r the left or the right). Personally I think that this is a story that deserved to be told sooner, if only to add to the genral popular awareness of the vampire threat…

This was a bit of a slow burner that I was prepared to kill if it looked like bollocks – instead I found a gripping thriller with an alternate taken on the last days of Edgar Allen Poe. Very well done and very much recommended. On a personal note I was intrigued to see Richard Sharkey‘s name in the credits as co-producer: I worked with Richard for a period when he was the lead location manager for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the consummate problem-solver for any and all of the practical logistic and support issues that arose everyday during filming. If I had not decided to stick with what I was doing at the time, he would have been my inspiration to jump ship into a similar career…

This was another sleeper that I took a bit of a punt on and found myself thoroughly enjoying…nothing stellar so far as story-lines or plots are concerned but just a good solid action movie…

So there you go, watched six movies and scored all six quite highly…in fact there was only one major disappointment and that was #7…

Prometheus. What a load of old bollocks and a blatant attempt to try to screw some more money from the Alien franchise….it was boring and nothing more than a remake of Alien without the terror, suspense or gripping storyline. It starts badly with a scene where an alien Engineer drinks what looks like passion-fruit seeds and flies all to bits – an action and scene totally irrelevant to the rest of the movie; it is never clear where all these civilisations across human history would note down in cave drawings the location of an obscure planet was not (SPOILER ALERT!!) the home world but just a cast-off wasteland world, and what was really happening on that planet. Even a little time spent on character development would not have gone astray: take out the standard Alien ploys like the facehuggers, acid for blood, etc, etc…and you could not have a movie that is more hohum…

2012 ESRI International User Conference

Posted on 11 September 2012 by SJPONeill

This just popped into my inbox while I was on a break…who would have though that a couple of years ago, Hawkeye was two guys in an tiny back office between an accountant and a dentist?

Great to see this team getting into the big leagues…my comments in red (doctrine writers can’t resist red pens in any form…)…

Hawkeye UAV was fortunate enough to be invited to exhibit at this year’s ESRI GIS User Conference in San Diego. With a sponsored booth in a prime position in Hall D we could only say “Yes, thank you!” So in late July, Rowland and myself made our way across from New Zealand. Rowland left the week prior to the UC in order to attend the preconference seminars, conduct some meetings and make our technology accessible to the Survey community. Along with the two of us, and providing their expertise on the photogrammetry processing were Luke, Hayden and Sheryl from Areo.

The first big coup was ESRI’s invitation to have our display bird on the main stage for the duration of the weekend and Plenary sessions at the start of the Conference. To put all this in perspective, the “main stage” is in front of a room in the region of 200m long, and is backed by three HUGE screens. The room hosted 16,000 people at one time, so a lot of GIS professionals saw our UAV onstage and some of our data as part of the plenary presentations.

An ESRI speaker talks about the AreoHawk onstage during the conference opening plenary

In fact many folks mentioned to us at the booth that they’d seen the AreoHawk onstage and asked about the content in the keynote presentation. It was both humbling an exciting to have our technology out there in front of the world.

Supporting us this year at our first time attending the ESRI UC were Hawkeye UAV Americas (HUA) – our North American partners from Tactical Systems Engineering. They were represented by Drew Gwyer, Dave Molthen and Ermie, and were brilliant in helping man the booth, collecting information and assisting people with their inquiries. Their local knowledge of San Diego was of great benefit also!

Check out these guys’ website some very cool and innovative kit there – I really want to get my mitts on WINGMAN and DACTYL to have a play with – possibly why they’re part of HUA (is that a take off ‘Hoo-aahh!’?)….

Special mention must also be made of Mark Deuter, Director of Aerometrex our distributor in Australia. He zoomed in from Australia to lend his vast expertise of all things aerial photography and provide a bit of Aussie contrast to the strong Kiwi flavour on the booth.

Monday before the conference start was our day to set up the booth before the Exhibitor Expo got underway Tuesday. Tuesday started with a hiss and a roar – when we were allowed into the exhibition hall at 8am to do our final setup and start the demos rolling, we only just got in before the influx of people started. It was soon apparent that we hadn’t printed nearly enough flyers to keep up with demand! If you were one of those who missed out, I’m very sorry. But we did get some more done to see us out until the end of the UC. The candy ran out before the end of day one too!

Hawkeye UAV booth in the middle of “UAS Central” at the ESRI UC 2012

The UAV seen here in the flesh (and in the top pic) and on the screen is the Hawkeye UAV home-grown aerial vehicle, AreoHawk – for its size, it has some pretty impressive performance specs and it is interesting to note, just how short its gestation period from first thought to first flight…

The conference has been a huge success for us. We have literally been hand-launched (rather than catapulted) onto the World’s stage. Interest from all over the globe and the United States has been tremendous and very encouraging. HUA/TSE share our ethos and vision for leading the precision survey Unmanned Aerial System market. It is also apparent to us that we not only have a world class system that’s been developed here in New Zealand, but the AreoGraph process is second to none.

We now expect our tempo to rise, and our global footprint to reach wider and further than before. A large number of confirmed sales and survey jobs have already come from the ESRI UC and we expect more to follow as soon as demonstrations and follow ups can be arranged.

Rules and Regulations:

Simply put, to fly UAS’s in the United States today you must either be a Government, Federal or State agency or a ‘not for profit’ organisation, such as a University. Federal Aviation Administration regulations currently require these parties to obtain a Certificate of Authorization (COA) before flight. In conjunction with HUA/TSE we are actively working with FAA representatives to achieve an accreditation for the licensed commercial flight of the AreoHawk system within the United States. We currently hold such accreditation in New Zealand with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and are also underway with CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) registration for Australia. We strongly believe our unblemished record will stand us in good stead in this regard.

Good point, well made…regardless of the size or whether you picked it up at Toyworld or Foreign Military Sales’R’Us, UAS of all sized need to operated in a controlled manner, with rules that are clear, understood and complied with by all involved. Nowhere is this more vital that in this category of AVs below 6kg where the common popular (mis)perception is that they are too small to matter so you can do what you like with them…well, you ain’t in Iraq anymore, Toto: if something bigger and faster takes your battery down an intake or through a window, well…let’s just say that we hope you’ve keep your liability insurance payments current. This being the case, it is good to see a commercial operator expounding these principles…

It has always been our intention, especially as aviators ourselves, to comply with and exceed the expectations of the governing body where these matters are concerned. Hence our emphasis on safety, failsafe systems, compliance and training.

Improved Areo Process:

We have found now that with the new and vastly improved AreoHawk processing software that we can re-process old jobs and archived imagery with great success. Second time around the quality of the orthos and the density of the point clouds are an amazing contrast.

This Areo process is damn exciting to anyone with any interest in the shape of the ground and/or object on it – with the new processes and the upgraded sensors on Areohawk – what you are seeing here is not a simple 2D image of the area but a 3D manipulatable (if that’s not a word it should be, meaning able to be manipulated) model of the surveyed area [makes note to nag Hawkeye guys about a Flash-based user steerable demo model] so, if you’re say, a miner, it’ll let you calculate how much spoil you taken from your mine; if you’re a shooter, it’ll let you work out to a high degree of accuracy lines of sight from shooters to shootees…

Semi-urban data resampled under the new Areo process. Point cloud data only is currently being displayed

More pictures from San Diego:

With the big guy! Drew, Simon, Jack Dangermond (ESRI CEO) and Rowland at the close of this year’s User Conference

Hawkeye UAV Ltd booth at this year’s ESRI International User Conference

US Navy A4 on the deck of the museum aircraft carrier, USS Midway

Can’t pass up a visit to any handy museums while in loc – although an A4 is a piece of paper: an A-4 is a lot cooler and faster –

Five Question Friday!! 8/17/12

Posted on 18 August 2012 by SJPONeill

It’s that time of week again – another five from Mama M

What’s the one thing you buy every time you walk into the store?

Three things:

Milk…hard to cook or bake without it and tea and coffee sans milk ain’t worth getting out of bed for – if we end up with a surplus, it can always go in the freezer for revitalising later for baking.

Dog roll…the walking carpets get fed Purina but get bored with the constant dry food and like to have something juicy/tasty to go with; whatever dog roll is on special is what gets grabbed but often they luxuriate in left-overs instead… breakfasts this morning was two cups of Purina each with a couple of big globs of mixed apple crumble, last night’s curry and rice, and porridge and yoghurt from our breakfast this morning…

Butter and marg…as for milk, butter is a bit of a must for a lot of baking plus toast/bread without some sort of spread is dry and yukky…

If you had a day all to yourself how would you spend it?

I would really like to have a decent crack at the challenge of a Blitzbau …I have been following most of them this time around and it looks like a lot of fun…just need to have a day to dedicate to one during the blitz season…

theconfidencestoat’s Matchbox 1/72 Hawker Hunter T7 56 Sqn RAF Coltishall 1964

Are you a speed limit driver? If not, over or under?

We have a 10kmh ‘tolerance’ here but I rarely go over that unless it’s a brief spurt when passing…far easier and cheaper these days to just add in some extra time if I really need to be somewhere on time…the twins on the other hand, are speed maniacs – can’t think where they get this from…?

What’s your favorite dessert to make, homemade or from a mix??

That’s an easy one…our self-saucing butterscotch pudding…it’s yummmmeeeee!! Oh, did you think I was going to share the special recipe…? Nope not even a pic less lest some culinary schemer deduce the secret ingredients…

Would you rather have a spider or a mouse scurry across your face (no copping out and saying “neither!!”)?

Probably a mouse as they tend to be in transit and are less likely to take up residence or want to contest ownership…not actually that fussed as spiders here (apart from whitetails) are not really much to worry about and, now that we slashed back all the scrub from around the house and installed the ring of death of bait stations, we don’t have much of a rodent problem…when we first moved here, the rats used to queue up on the deck by the front door to hoover down any leftovers the dogs might have left…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Posted on 21 July 2012 by SJPONeill

A look inside the jet pipe of a F-22 Raptor at the USAF Museum near Dayton, Ohio…not a view you often see…

How you would normally see a F-22…

Intelliroofing

Posted on 29 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Just saw a great item on Close-Up about a couple building their new house with the clear and achievable objective of having a ZERO power bill…great stuff and so very easy when you building a house from new because you can incorporate this very cool stuff into the design itself. The two things that I liked about this design are the extra thick wall that allows an extra 45mm of insulation to be added simply by adding an extra batten to the outside of the framing; and the ever so cool Intelliroof where solar panels replace traditional roofing surfaces, saving cost and weight…this couple claim that they will never need a heater in this house and while I think that is a little optimistic – and no cheating by wearing 17 layers of clothing in winter! – it will be a very warm house.

It’ll probably be quite cost-effective too as they are structuring it so that any surplus will be fed back into the national grid. This begs two important questions: the first, of course is why didn’t we know about this when we replaced the Lodge roof in January! Shifty Just like when we laid the big concrete drive – which still looks awesome – only to learn only a week later about the geothermal heat exchange technology (aka ground source heating) for which we could have laid the hoses under the driveway concrete Baring teeth smile – if we had known – even if we had waited a while before installing the actual heat exchangers and radiators…

And secondly, why is the Government not subsidising these sort of initiatives to promote the generation of clean electricity? Yeah sure, they do subsidise insulating your house and made it mandatory to have specced insulation and double-glazing in new houses BUT nothing that might really chip into powerco profits like a broader generation base. For us, I think we’d probably use most of the power generated while we are at home but for those periods when we are away, a good 70-80% of our power generation capacity could be directed back to the national grid. Even if every new house only generated 10% of its actual needs, that still 10% that doesn’t need to be generated elsewhere, especially in dirty stinky oil and coal burning power stations, and a potential surplus to be fed back into the grid. And if it helps stick it to greedy monopolies like The Lines Company, the better – although they are serious provocation to just cut the cable and jack out…

Intelliroof is marketed in New Zealand by SolarCity – I hooked over to their website as soon as the Close-Up item was finished and it looks pretty slick – definitely worth a look but be aware that they have been a bit lazy and all their brochures are UK ones so not directly relevant or correct for the NZ environment . Little things like that may me wonder just how secure they are so hopefully they will get that sorted quickly and will be able to establish themselves successfully in this market…

Good on Close-Up just for once for running a useful story that isn’t focussed on more whining cry-babies or more irrelevant pseudo-celebrity antics…ironically, having said that, the Intelliroof story is the only one not specially featured on their FB page tonight…

So, there you go, just a quick item on some cool technology with some real potential…give SolarCity a call and show some interest in what they are doing, encourage them to update those brochures with Kiwi ones and let’s go GREEN!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Create

Posted on 23 June 2012 by SJPONeill

Create is this week’s theme…it’s no secret that in my 2.3 seconds of spare time each week, I like to build models, especially models of unusual subjects…one of the more unusual projects on a slow burn is this build (creation) of a 1/72 model of the Soviet pre-WW2 river monitor, Udarnyj…she saw the opening days of Russia’s entry into the Great Patriotic War but was sunk by German air power in the early phases of Barbarossa…

Udarnyj is a paper model produced by a publisher in Poland, Modelik, in 1/100 scale in a A4 booklet….in 2009 they adopted a practice of including low-res images of their model parts on their website. Although the quality is less than that in the book (these models are not legally available for electronic download – i.e. they are only available in the printed book form), and not all the sheets are shown, there was enough of the Udarnyj shown to be able to construct a fairly close waterline model over her. This is what I started to build before my conscience kicked in and I ordered the book from Poland with some other similar models…

To go with other 1/72 vessels I have, I enlarged the parts from 1/100 to 1/72 using an A3 copier (increase by 139%) and printed the parts onto 110gsm paper.

This was followed by a number of nights laminating structural parts to heavier card and then carefully cutting out the pieces – care is required because the more accurate the cutting the better the fit – also because the knife is damn sharp!

Here the structure slowly develops….

I use a double-skin approach, laying down an initial skin layer…

and filling any gaps or depressions…this prevents the rib-cage effect when applying the actual hull sheets…

…so that it looks a lot smoother…

The hull sides were then added…the stripes around the foredeck are a real pain as you have to join the sheets edge to edge and there is not a lot of room for error due to the very narrow glueing surfaces.

And this is as far as I have got so far…a more detailed description of the build is here at Paper Modelers – you’ll see from the dates that this is a long term build; and since that last photo was taken, she sustained some damage in the car when I took her down to ‘show and tell’ at Scale Models Wellington in February and I haven’t had time since to repair or progress her… I have acquired some detail parts for her like plastic quad Maxims for the anti-aircraft positions and two Airfix 5.5″ guns in case I have problems rolling the main armament barrels from paper…we’ll get there eventually – our target is Scale Model Expo 2014…

It’s dorky, it’s ugly and…

Posted on 21 June 2012 by SJPONeill

…and it serves no useful purpose…

A solution in search of a problem

OK, so, yeah whatever, it’s technically very cool and it’s not REALLY an aircraft so you can let a couple of NCOs operate it – and of course save a bundle on what you would actually have to pay a proper crew…

I’m clearly a big fan of unmanned systems – in entirely the wrong job if I wasn’t – but it’s like they used to teach in the good old days at the Tactics School ‘..task with a purpose…’ that is, you don’t just do stuff simply because you can…

So what are my issues with the unmanned cargo aerial vehicle:

Even the acronym is dodgy as UCAV also represents unmanned combat aerial vehicle and I’m not sure we want to be getting to two confused. Maybe a good rule of thumb could be that if you have two acronyms that can be applied interchangeably but mean totally different things, then one of them has to change. Litmus test: would anyone be upset if the US announced it was deploying ‘UCAVs’ to Libya? (Let’s not go near the whole Syrian debacle…

It’s optionally manned i.e. the cockpit is still there and functional so that if required a pilot (one only as it is a single seater) can operate it. Sounds like someone is hedging their bets but who’d want to be flying a single seat unarmoured helicopter at low level in the badlands…possibly keeping it sellable so keep an eye out for some slightly used optionally manned K-Maxs on eBay.

It’s meant to save lives. How is not exactly clear. The greater numbers of casualties in a helicopter crash come from the passengers – this thing isn’t carrying passengers and it’s only doing ash and trash tasks which are not noted as being amongst the more dangerous helicopter missions unless all of a sudden boredom is actually a hazard.

Oh, I see, it’s meant to save lives by reducing the amount of ground traffic that needs to be exposed to the IED threat. But haven’t we been doing the airborne resupply thing for years now? What has K/Max really brought to the party except another aircraft type to maintain and operate?

This whole thing of we’ll only travel by air because of the IEDs gives the lie to ‘war amongst the people’: having come in and screwed up your country, we happy for us to have the luxury of free air travel…whoa, you locals step away from the aircraft – you still get to travel by land and risk the threat aimed at us. Yeah right, much as we don’t want our people to go in harm’s way, this is simply ceding the ground to the bad guys which bad. What’s worse is that validates IEDs as valid and effective tools to employ against ground forces. Expect to see (LOTS) more of them until they go the way of the Zeppelin and and made untenable as weapon systems. That means putting more resource into countering IEDs to the left, well to the left of the BANG. the K-Max UCAV isn’t going to help you there.

The K-Max might actually add to the problems created by ceding the land environment (great for air forces though!!) because every boring mundane MANNED ash and trash mission puts eyes on the ground, and the more that they cover the same area on a routine basis, the greater the familiarity they build up and the more likely they are to be able to detect and identify some form of anomaly or indicator that might need to be followed up.

Every manned helicopter currently doing the ash and trash mission can be reroled on the fly for emergency dust-off of casualties or to provide airborne ISR for troops in contact…can’t really do that with the K-Max UCAV. You also can’t use it to provide quick fires with its door guns because it doesn’t have doors let alone guns…can’t toss an airborne sniper up in it either…

There are hidden costs. This thing is not fitted with any form of self-protection system so its only really any good where there no air threat to helicopters. One also wonders how good the flight control system is once the aircraft has been damaged in flight – will it be able to autonomously divert to an alternate LZ or even opt to make an emergency landing in the field?

So sorry, close but no cigar…UAVs are useful but they are not a universal panacea for all ills and they certainly do make the IED issue ‘go away’…but everything has to actually contribute meaningfully to the war effort and, as writ to date, the K-Max UCAV simply doesn’t…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Blue

Posted on 18 May 2012 by SJPONeill

Eliminating ‘blue‘ sea and ‘blue‘ skies from my quest, I simply scrolled through my Picasa library and waiting for a ‘blue’ (no! not that sort of blue!!) picture to catch my eye…the winner was this Martin B-10 at the USAF Museum near Dayton, in the common pre-WW2 scheme of blue fuselage and yellow wings…

Then I became curious as to the ‘why’ of this colour scheme which seems counter-intuitive for operational military aircraft and found this explanation at War and Game:

BLU AND YELLA

The use of two color schemes, Light Blue for trainers, and Olive Drab for tactical aircraft, caused logistical headaches for Air Corps maintenance facilities. Quantities of O.D. and Light Blue paints were required in stock at all time. Another problem was the need to know an aircraft’s ultimate destination before paint could be applied: examples of many aircraft served in the training roles, and thus could require blue fuselages.

The solution, as recommended by the Chief of the Material Division in January 1934, was to standardize one paint scheme for all aircraft, regardless of role. His choice was Light Blue fuselages and Yellow wings and tails, reasoning that high visibility was essential for trainers, while temporary water paint camouflages made the lower-contrast Olive Drab for tactical aircraft unnecessary. Stocks of Olive Drab were at the reorder point, making a timely decision that much more important, and in February the recommendation was approved by the Chief of the Air Corps. Revised specifications and T.O’s were printed in May, and shortly afterward, tactical aircraft were noted with Light Blue fuselages.

OK, I can live with that….