March 2009.

Wing Commander Andrew Green, OBE, BA, RAF is a long person. Six feet four inches long in fact. A Phantom and Tornado pilot and of course the current World Land Speed Record holder, he as an aside Captained the RAF Cresta Run Team to victory in the Inter Services Championship just a month or so back.

He is embarrassingly healthy, supremely confident and also vastly amiable. Ask him something and his reply invariably begins with a grin and the words “Good question….” even if you’ve just asked the way to the Gents. It would be no surprise to find the word Leadership tattooed across his forehead in RAF stencil one of these fine mornings. In facial features he slightly resembles Prince Charles, only a sort of younger and meaner and leaner version.

On this particular morning he is amiably sitting in what at first glance looks like a tea chest re-cycled into a kiddies’ soap-box on wheels. Except that somebody seems to have forgotten the wheels. This – well, thing – sits on the draughty floor of a largish workshop at the University of West of England. (UWE). This workshop rejoices under the title of RAMP, which stands for Revolutionary Aerospace Machining Project. Quite what revolutions they might be machining are concealed behind screens, but in front of those screens sits the skeletal frame of the burgeoning full-size BLOOHOUND mock-up – and also, separately, the soapbox on no-wheels with Andy Green in it, in driving suit and helmet.

This thing is not lovely. Well-finished and sturdy, certainly, but lovely – well, no. But it is in fact the most intelligent soapbox on the planet. It is the first mock-up of the BLOODHOUND cockpit. There is no requirement for it to look pretty, but a great need for it to be functional. And functional it very much is. Everything, from seat squab and back to pedal positions, instrument panel angle, steering wheel position (or not-wheel – more of that later), side switch-panels – everything is highly adjustable and then lockable, so that the net result is a cockpit built around A Green. The dimensions of the result – including the position of Andy’s head – are recorded by a Product Sponsor called Faro who specialise in measuring things. This they are doing with a device which looks like a dentist’s drill, but which I am told is something computational and highly accurate and can be integrated with BLOODHOUND’s CAD design.

I look on it with envy. As a more reasonably-sized homo sapiens than Andy Green – all right, a short-ass of 5 ft 4 ins – I have spent a small proportion of my life sitting in aerobatic cockpits apparently designed for 7ft gorillas born with a parachute on their back. This has repeatedly led me to adding telephone books under and behind me as cushion-patterns until I could achieve both full control deflection and also see out of the window at the same time. Could have used those guys with the dentist drill back then….

I sit in the mock-up myself. It is now configured for Andy, so as expected my forward vista consists of the instrument panel and nothing much else. No surprise there. What is surprising is that the seat squab is most sharply tilted up at the front and that the seat-back is not far from upright, so that my ass squodges down into the bottom of a sort of V-shape. This would be approximately the last posture I would want for high G tolerance, but then of course my mind is programmed to aircraft G. Aircraft G goes up and down, whereas Andy’s G in BLOODHOUND operates fore-and-aft under acceleration-deceleration, which is a rather different proposition.

(Not to mention that Andy Green must be fairly immune to discomfort anyway, having spent thousands of hours sitting in Martin Baker ejector seats which have all the ergonomics of a concrete loo and only become suddenly and rather briefly comfortable if you pull a yellow-and-black handle).

I wriggle my ass and think about it. The upright torso angle means that under fore-and-aft G your main body organs are being pressed back and forth rather than up and down – which is a Good Thing. And the fact that your bum is in a deep V – that plus the five-point harness – stops you disappearing forwards into the nose-cone with the steering wheel in your mouth under 3G deceleration. They call that ‘submarining’.

Unsurprisingly, with the cockpit set up for Andy I cannot reach the pedals at all. They could be adjusted for me, such is the cleverness of the mock-up, but somehow I do not have the heart to ask. I look around hopefully in case someone says: “Hey, let’s have Lecomber drive it because the whole car could be a foot shorter!” but oddly enough no-one does. Instead someone says “Hey, Brian, d’you want a sandwich?”  And I climb out of the soapbox.

In fact, I have learned a lot. And the first thing I have learned is that this mock-up is the product of some very bright young brains indeed. The project was given to a 15-strong team of Project Design Technology students at UWE. This team was deliberately and with malice aforethought given a fairly minimal pre-briefing, the idea being not to saddle them with too many pre-conceptions. Basically they were told; “Think it out for yourselves – your fresh eyes might come up with some new innovation”.

Well, they came up with plenty of innovation. Or no innovation at all, depending on how you look at it. They came up with a cockpit most admirably laid out for the job in hand. Their conclusions almost exactly matched the BLOODHOUND team’s own ideas. Their innovation clicked with BLOODHOUND’s innovation.

So nothing learned?

Wrong. A huge amount learned. Give young scientists a spare-rib and they’ll chew it until there’s nothing left but a bare bone with the odd tooth-mark in it. They will come up with an answer. Sometimes it will be as you expected. Sometimes it will not be. This time it is, everyone is cheered, and important dimensions are recorded which will be used very much for real. But the not-obvious point is that this has been a fresh look – and a vivid illustration of how BLOODHOUND and education can shake hands. The chances of BLOODHOUND getting built only to find that Andy can’t fold himself into it are now zero.

Dammit.

The mating of car and jet fighter

So you are about to drive BLOODHOUND.

What will the cockpit look like?

Well, the short answer is a bit like the result of an amorous liaison between a car and a jet fighter. There are two pedals – footbrake on the left and throttle pedal on the right. The throttle controls the jet engine, and the first half of the pedal travel takes the EJ200 from idle to full dry power. You then press the throttle further, through a detent, and the afterburner lights up. The burner is variable, so the rest of the pedal-travel increases re-heat power up unto flat out.

So far, pretty much car-like – but there is one little bitty difference.

Which is that once you are in re-heat, if you take your foot off the loud pedal it does not come back to idle – it only returns to the detent, so that the engine stays in minimum afterburn. The reason for this is that if you come out of afterburn but then want it back again the system takes a few seconds to purge itself before the burner kicks back in, which could be inconvenient. So there is a sort of hook on the top of the throttle pedal, which Andy has his toes under so that he can physically pull the throttle back past the detent and down into the dry-power range when he means it.

All very logical. But not exactly a feature likely to catch on in the wider car market.

Nor is the steering wheel, which is not in fact a wheel all but an aircraft-style yoke. Here the fighter genes of the aircraft/car union are very much in ascendance, arising from a principle called HOTAS.

HOTAS is one of those acronyms the military is so fond of. It does not refer to the cute little waitress in the Officers Mess, but stands for Hands On Throttle And Stick. The idea is that in the event of serious pugnacity the last thing a pilot needs is his hands flying around the cockpit to reach things – he needs all weapons and certain other vital systems to be available without taking his hands off stick or throttle. This is a most laudable objective, but as weapons proliferate it does carry the slight downside that both throttle and stick are home to so many buttons, switches and triggers that there is very little room left for the original component – the human hand.

(Possibly the primary example of this is the Harrier, where you grip the stick with your second finger and thumb rather like a genteel lady holding a cup of afternoon tea. Close your whole fist hard and you fire off two Sidewinders, drop an iron bomb, transmit to base and re-trim the aircraft all in one swift hit. Which may not be entirely what you had in mind. Which is why it takes you about two weeks to learn to fly the aeroplane, two months to learn the systems, and more like a year before you’ve got the whole caboodle arranged in your brain so that it becomes instinctive. At which stage, of course, somebody promptly changes something….)

BLOODHOUND, inevitably, has caught a dose of HOTAS. I suppose here it should be termed HOBY – Hands On Bloody Yoke.

Because once rolling, the one sure thing is that Andy doesn’t want to take his hands off the yoke at any time. Functions like engine-start, rocket enable, hydraulic check, read-out selection, parachute arming, control checks, systems checks – they are all carried out static before a run, so they can all be initiated from the horizontal control panels alongside his legs. But once the run starts, no – it’s Hands On Bloody Yoke.

So the yoke has to sprout controls. The final details are ‘work in progress’ in BLOODHOUND-speak, but some things are obvious. The Falcon rocket has to be fired by a trigger which is a bit like a Dead Man’s Hand throttle on a railway train; you pull the trigger to fire the rocket and keep it pulled so long as you want rocket-burn. Release it for any reason and the systems cut off the HTP flow and the rocket stops within half a second. Only way to be fail-safe.

Then there is the panic button. It is difficult to imagine Andy Green panicking under any circumstances whatsoever except perhaps in a rum-drinking competition with me, but this button exists for the purpose of cutting all power to both jet and rocket instantaneously and at the same time isolating the throttle pedal, thus leaving Andy with nothing much to do but the trivial chore of bringing six-and-a-half tonnes of supersonic car to a halt.

Then there is the airbrake switch, which will probably need to be progressive because you don’t necessarily want to whack the whole barn door out at once as you slow through 800 mph. Then the braking parachute triggers, which might end up as paddles-switches on left and right. And then the radio TX button. And then….

So, like it or not, this yoke is going to be button-encrusted. But at the same time, A Green may have to slam it with great vigour from one lock to the other without hitting any unintended buttons in the process. The whole team fervently hope this will never be required – but the capability has got to be there, because on a bad day it might be. It certainly was in Thrust SSC.

The steering works on a ratio of 30:1 – which means that if you twist the yoke 30 degrees, to, say, the right, the front wheels steer right by a whole 1 deg. The maximum turn of the yoke is 135 deg each way from centre, so the maximum front wheel deflection is 4.5 degrees either side of straight-ahead. This could be a slight disadvantage if you wanted to park at Tesco’s – especially if you happened to nudge the rocket-trigger while you were backing-and-filling – but to the best of my knowledge there are no plans to park BLOODHOUND in Tesco’s, and anyway there is no room for the shopping.

Steering ratios are always a compromise. A fairly high-speed road car will have a steering-ration of around 12:1. This would be boringly heavy at parking speeds if it were not for power steering, but feels about right at around 100 mph – not too twitchy, not too sloppy. A few years ago, for reasons I will not bore you with, I re-equipped a ‘70’s supercar, a De Tomaso Pantera, with a racing car steering rack with a ratio of 7.5:1. This was arm-achingly heavy in Tesco’s car park, but at around 100 mph made for very accurate steering, for which Panteras in their standard form were not exactly famed.

However, wind it up to 150 mph and you were, if not quite hanging on for grim death, at least paying a very great deal of attention. The thing was so twitchy that there was a strong feeling that if you sneezed you’d start the spasm at Silverstone and finally stop rolling at Brands Hatch. Or somewhere around Watford, anyway.

BLOODHOUND has this problem in spades. A steering ratio of 30:1 is ridiculously sloppy at low speeds, but passing about 500 mph it is most assuredly going to feel more than slightly sensitive. At 1,000 mph….?

Faced with this, the first step is to put Andy Green into the most ergonomically efficient cockpit he can get into. For this will be his battleground. And on this day, this group of young scientists have gone a great way to achieving just that.

For them, it may have been one project among many, but it clearly inspired them. In tribute, here are their names, lest they might otherwise be forgotten.

Drew Batchelor (Senior Lecturer Product Design); David Henshall (Senior Lecturer, Technology); James Celbeck; Hywel Vauqhan; Stan Attwell; James Palmer; Matt Ohman; Ben Healy; George Pickup; Richard Jones; Luke Broderick; Gregory Harrison; Will Vonderstogen-Drake; William Clement-Jones; Chris Hedges; Katherine White.