All iconic projects are led by visionaries.

And all iconic projects much resemble a large central cogwheel – called The Project – with other various-sized cogwheels engaging around its circumference. Some of these act as drivers, some of them act as brakes. And they vary. Some cogs can be brakes one week and drivers the next. Which can frequently become exasperating for those mortals faced with the nigh-impossible task of making everything rotate in harmony.

BLOODHOUND is no exception. Indeed, in BLOODHOUND it could be said there are two central cogwheels – one labelled Car Build and the other Education.

For Car Build the peripheral cogwheels are aerodynamics, mechanical design, stability, control systems, Product Sponsor involvement, and manufacture. Oh, and yes, funding…

For the last year or so the major slow-down cog has been aerodynamics. This was never entirely surprising. If you’d gone to McDonnell Douglas and asked for an F18 with a capability of Mach 1.4 with the undercarriage down at an altitude of 13 centimetres they’d have given you a nice cup of coffee laced with sedative and sent you off under armed guard to the guys who did the special effects on Star Wars. No – this was always going to be the most difficult bit. Nobody knew how difficult, for the good and adequate reason that nobody had ever even contemplated it before, never mind tried it…

Turned out to be very difficult. Very, very, very difficult. And also possessed of many knock-on effects.

Take the stability cogwheel. You can get a long way down the line with dynamic stability calculations in roll, yaw, and pitch, but then you run into a but – said but being simply that aerodynamic forces will have a totally tyrannical affect on stability at very high speeds.

So you cannot finalise stability until the aerodynamics are solved.

Then mechanical design. You can get so far with the structural plans, but then you have to pause for the good reason that you don’t know the final shape.

So you cannot finalise structural design until the aerodynamics are solved.

Then control systems. You can go a long way with the electronic and hydraulic circuitry, but you can’t go all the way because you are lacking one most vital piece of information – viz, to what degree you need to activate the all-important winglets, at what speeds you need to do so, and above all what the loads on them are then going to be.

So you cannot finalise control systems until the aerodynamics are solved.

Then there is the very large matter of BLOODHOUND’s 200 or so Product Sponsors. A considerable percentage of these are offering to create components – frequently expensive and complex components. These vital parts will be within their own fields of expertise, but distinctly one-off items for BLOODHOUND. And mostly – not always, the classic cases being outfits like Intel and MathWorks who are involved in the design process rather than car-build – but mostly, you can’t define your exact requirements until you’re into the very detailed design stage. Which can only follow aerodynamic design-freeze...

So you cannot finalise a lot of your sponsor-input until the aerodynamics are solved.

Well…

Well, now the aerodynamics are solved.

 

I’ll say that again…

I’ll say that again. THE AERODYNAMICS ARE SOLVED. Bar a few details – important details, but minor insomuch as they won’t affect the all-vital basic car shape – the aerodynamics are solved. I won’t attempt to explain the how of it here because Dr Ben Evans – BLOODHOUND’s Computational Fluid Dynamics guru and one of the very main swordsmen in slaying this particular dragon – explains it most eruditely in his superb article of a few days ago, Config 10 – the Holy Grail. But the message is simple – with Config 10, the aerodynamics are solved.

Yee-hah…!

(The end design result is in fact much like the javelin I described in my Outside The Box article of Jan ’09 – basically a lance with as few warts on it as possible. I wanna tell you that this prescience was due to my intuitive and outstanding grasp of aerodynamics – however, honesty compels me to admit it was just the pure luck of the pig-ignorant. Damn it).

Now solving the aerodynamics is a bit like pulling the bottom tree trunk out of a log-jam. Stand back, because as that log’s yanked out suddenly all the rest let go in a rush. And release a torrent of…

Well, in BLOODHOUND’s case, all the pent-up designs which were waiting on aerodynamics.

Moreover, the breakthrough coincided with some other changes. One of them being John Piper stepping down and Mark Chapman being nominated Chief Engineer. Now I have a deep respect and liking for both Mark and John – indeed there is no person on the BLOODHOUND team who I do not both like and respect – so I do not propose to dwell on that, other than one remark from my own life-experience. Aerobatic teams are not unlike land speed record teams in spirit – and in such rare and adventurous endeavours sometimes things change. Hopefully not too often – but sometimes things change. Not in the final objective, not in the least. But in the methodology…

I’ll come back to methodology in a second. It is important.

Another effect is funding. BLOODHOUND is by no means bereft of funding – but at the same time it has to be said that the last couple of years haven’t been exactly the easiest period in recent history to be trying to scare up major mazuma. Nobody’s fault – that’s just how it is.

And money, of course, means time. With BLOODHOUND running at £110,000 a month now and rising to £250,000 a month as the build starts – well, sure as hell nobody ain’t gonna be taking no two-hour lunch-breaks down the pub. The longer it stretches, the more it costs

These three factors – aerodynamic breakthrough, team change, financial pressure – are resulting in a subtle change of methodology.

In Mark Chapman’s words; “We’re not now trying to produce the best 1,000 mph car – we’re trying to produce the first 1,000 mph car”.

When I first heard this mantra I was a bit inclined to ask how the best might differ. Leather seats with memory-adjustment, maybe? Reversing sensors? Hook for a take-away Indian in the cockpit? Bigger cup-holder and ashtray…?

But that is banal. What all of the above actually adds up to is a small but important change of attitude.

Or call it a new sense of urgency.

This is not too difficult to explain. Option One is to spend another three years on research and come up with (it says here) the Perfect Answer. Option Two says; “Folks, however the perfect answer comes out it is always going to be based on certain assumptions – and we need to get building NOW, and accept that we’ll still be learning when we’re testing. Which we were always going to be doing anyway”.

So the adventure just got a tad – not a lot, just a tad or smidgeon – more adventurous. Art Arfons probably chuckled in his final resting place.

Which is why we’re now all gathered together, Brethren, sitting around a big table in the rather echoing BLOODHOUND Technical Centre.

At the start of the great Engineering Summit Meeting of May 2010.

 

The Summit which dissolved

Now I cordially dislike committee meetings. My idea of the ideal committee meeting is a 10 minute post-flight de-brief with my Number Two formation pilot, preferably not leading to actual physical violence.

But this BLOODHOUND meeting is going to last for three… oh Gawd…three days. I am hugely privileged to be the only observer allowed in – but three days of committee meetings…

Within three hours I am riveted. I thought I knew a lot about BLOODHOUND. I did not know about this new sense of urgency.

Remember I mentioned a torrent of technology? Well, this summit is designed not to ruminate on what’s right, but to focus on what ain’t right yet. Nonetheless the speed at which solutions – or at least pathways to solutions – emerge astounds me. And keeping a surreptitious eye on the Team members I kinda get the feeling it astounds most of them, too. The Summit is not one single meeting but a slightly bewildering series of conferences, very often split up so that two different discussions are going on at the same time in two different rooms, sometimes with Product Sponsors attending. There being only one of me at the last count, this makes life a little difficult.

It matters not. It is not often a simple pilot gets to sit in on history in the making. I cannot furnish a Hansard-style report of the debates, which would anyway bore you to tears, but here are some vignettes from those three days…

 

Winglets

By far the most important achievement of Config 10 was getting rid of the lift at the back end at supersonic speeds – what the team call ‘Mach sensitivity’, and what I’ve always thought of as a rather regrettable tendency for BLOODHOUND to lift its ass off the desert passing Mach 1 and set about creating a new World Tunnelling Speed Record. According to CFD, Config 10 has cracked it – there is practically no change in fore/aft axle loads from being parked at Tesco right up to Mach 1.4.

Which means you don’t need winglets to compensate, right?

Well, not quite. There may be a new sense of optimism in the team, but they ain’t that optimistic. Okay, the winglets can be smaller than they might have been – which is all to the good – but winglets there will be. Mark Chapman outlines the three options. One; fixed winglets with no movement at all; two, winglets which are fixed but which can be manually adjusted statically with a vernier-type arrangement; or three, stick with the original concept of hydraulically controlled ‘active’ winglets with the capability of changing their angle of attack with speed according to a pre-set programme.

At the great Summit Meeting, Option One lasts about 2 seconds on the general grounds of it being unwise to stick two fingers up against all the laws of possibility. Option Two – instantly popular, because it confers the ability of adjustment in the light of experience but removes any possibility of actuation failure. Option Three – ‘active’ control – well, we don’t need it, so why fit it…?

Except we might need it.

With all the CFD in the world 1,000 mph is still dragon territory, and the car might turn out to need active. If it does there’s going to be a lot of head-scratching and mutterings of  “Why the hell’s that?” out on the Hakskeen Pan – but it just might.

Mark summed it up. “Let's not design ourselves into a corner. We probably don’t need active, but we’ll look fools if it turns out we do and we’ve left it out”.

Solution: replace the winglet actuators with solid ground-adjustable links, but at the same time design and build in the skeleton of the active system so it can be retro-fitted fairly easily if necessary.

Bong. Decision made. Not universally popular, but decision made. Next please…

 

The right vibes

The Hakskeen Pan in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa is very flat indeed. However, like any mud playa desert surface you are not exactly going to be ironing your shirt on it. And if you insist on driving on it on solid wheels at 1,000 mph the experience is not, repeat not, going to be quite like wafting down the M1 in a Rolls Royce. The vibration is going to be intense, both on Andy Green’s long pink body and the structure of the car.

Two to three Hertz (cycles per second) is a manageable frequency for both man and machine. Wind it up to six Hz and you run into car stiffness problems and driver jiggling-up problems at much the same time. You can reduce the vibration frequency by softening springs and dampers, but for many obvious reasons – mainly roll stability – you don’t want to soften them too much.

Professor Dave Crolla, dynamic stability expert, recently asked BLOODHOUND’s South African contingent exactly how smooth the Hakskeen surface is. Back came the cheerful reply from those in charge of surface-preparation – how smooth do you want it to be?

Good question.

Decision – Dave Crolla to work on defining a target smoothness figure which will keep the frequency within bounds.

Bong. Next…

 

Of wheels, brakes and Fred Flintstone

BLOODHOUND’s first test runs are not going to be on desert at all, of course, there being very little sense in hiking the whole kit and caboodle all the way to South Africa only to find there’s some quite trivial teething problem which requires the puppy to go back to the doghouse for a few days. No, the first shake-down runs will be on long runways in the UK. Heathrow kind of feels that BLOODHOUND runs might not do a lot for their airline scheduling, so the likely venue(s) are places like Bristol Filton. And since the longest runways available are less than one-sixth of the length of Hakskeen Pan, quite obviously there are no records involved of any kind – just blasting up to the 200 – 250 mph speed range (almost certainly under jet power alone) to check systems, sensors, stability, etc.

All fine and dandy – except of course that you can’t use solid desert wheels with a V-shaped footprint on a runway. (Well, I suppose you could, but the proprietor of said runway might just be less than delighted about four slots carved in it, the wheels certainly wouldn’t have a V-profile any more by the end of the run, and BLOODHOUND sounding a bit like a steamroller on dry concrete would be just plain embarrassing).

No – for the runway trials you must have rubber tyres, and also brakes on all four wheels. You might deploy a drag-chute as well, but you still need decent brakes.

Difficult, but not impossibly difficult. Wheels from the old BAC (nėe English Electric) Lightning fighter are about the right size, both wheels and tyres are rated to 265 mph (the tyres normally inflated to 350 psi), and a very major aero tyre company is willing to create whatever runway tyres BLOODHOUND might need. No great problem there.

Also no great problem with the brakes for the runway car. From a measly 200 mph there are at first glance several road-going supercar brakes which would work, not to mention F1 brakes. Well never mind first glance because they wouldn’t, because their cars don’t weigh between 5 and 6.5 tonnes, which BLOODHOUND does. Still no major problem because various aircraft brakes – particularly the Lighting’s – are certainly designed to cope with that sort of load. So for a runway, BLOODHOUND can get brakes.

For the desert, however…

Ah. For the desert, a bit different. Firstly, the idea is that BLOODHOUND will not have rear brakes at all in the desert. The front brakes do by far the major work anyway, and rear brakes would be inconvenient – very inconvenient – aerodynamically. So front brakes only.

Problem.

Not a problem in the stopping power – there are actually quite a few brakes which will do that – but a slightly more fundamental issue. They may well work fine stopping a mass from 250 mph – but will they also cope with a spin-speed of 10,000 rpm at 1,000 mph without the rotors flying apart? Proprietary (say) aircraft brakes won’t have been proofed to that because nobody has ever – quite rightly – anticipated any such requirement, it generally being agreed in aerospace that it’s not an especially good wheeze to stick the wheels down at Mach 1.4, and an even worse idea trying to land at such a velocity. One-off (or all right, two-off, to be pedantic) built-for-purpose brakes can certainly be designed and test-spun – but then cometh the slight practical glitch that there ain’t that many carbon-disc manufacturers around, and so far all of them seem to be maxed-out for the foreseeable future.

Research will go on – but in the meantime, at the great Summit, surfaces a new idea called the Dirt Brake. Actually it’s not new – Craig Breedlove used it on his Spirit of America 13 years ago – but the idea is that instead of wheel brakes you simply lower down a sort of scraper-anchor onto the desert and slow down that way. Very simple, and nothing ain’t gonna fly apart at 1,000 mph…

Breedlove called it the Fred Flintstone brake. And if anybody doesn’t know what that means, search out the old Flintstone cartoons.

Decision: keep looking at disc brakes – but design-in the possibility of a Flintstone dirt-brake as well.

Bong. Next…

 

There is no justice

There is no justice in this world. I do not have space to detail how much was achieved at the Summit. The above are just vignettes. Earlier I described it as ‘The Summit which dissolved’ – and I stick to my guns. Because it did dissolve to a degree. But the reason it dissolved in places was because of widespread agreement which did not require much debate.

For a project, this can only be a good thing. The cogs starting to move in unison…

I will come back to more details in future articles.

 

Appendix

While I write this the Design Team are in a sort of Purdah. Not too arduous a Purdah, because they’re taking five days away at a resort to have fun, frolic – I have a bit of difficulty imagining that – and mostly discuss the Project. In fact, almost entirely to discuss the Project. They call it Planning in the Parc. Not my idea of a big holiday, but…

Well, well. At the conclusion Mark says that the plan for the remaining design and build will be finished next week. They’ve gone through the car nose to tail and broken it down into 300 sub-assemblies, each one having a lead-time, path to manufacture, and cost allocation – as he describes it, “Our first realistic plan to completion”.

Definitely not my idea of a big holiday – but yes, this is vital. Vital if all the cogs are to move in unison…