Let me tell you an uncomfortable truth about HPs – HP meaning Heroic Projects. Such as BLOODHOUND. Indeed, especially BLOODHOUND. Let me tell you that in this risk-averse 21^st century all HPs – and again especially BLOODHOUND – are in the calculated risk business. That is the blunt, no-nonsense fact. If anyone tries to tell you that 1,000 mph on land can be achieved without risk, look at them very sideways. And ask them if they still believe in the Tooth Fairy.

But there are, of course, risks and risks. Degrees of risk. In my simple aviator’s lexicon I see risk rather like a set of traffic lights – red, amber, green. Green being as calculated as you can get it, amber being pushing your luck a bit, and red being verging on the gamble.

In BLOODHOUND, the actual car design is in the green sector – the calculations are extreme, and if these calculations take longer than expected – well, tough. But this has to be in the green-light zone. Nobody pretends that it’s perfect – but as good as you can get at this stage of homo sapiens evolution. Design over-rides all other considerations…

Support is a somewhat different kettle of fish. Support has to fund it – both the design and the car-build. Support, headed of course by Richard Noble, can head up into the amber with a distinct tinge of red in it – ‘cos whatever else happens, nobody ain’t gonna get killed. So sometimes you have to push. Call it verging on the gamble…

Such as the Farnborough International Air Show. Where we are now.

Richard sips an insipid coffee while I swallow a life-saving beer. “It’s a concerted brinkmanship effort”, he says. “It’s like a high-wire act. You always have to be moving on, achieving. Otherwise you fade away. You have to show that you’re innovating and making it happen. You know that – you’ve dealt with sponsors. So you have to gamble a bit sometimes”.

“Such as here?”

Richard has a wide range of facial expressions which can change on an instant. Now he produces his very best vulpine grin.

“Very much such as here”.

I watch as he strides away to yet another meeting. Finish my beer, look around me, and consider the realities of BLOODHOUND’s presence here and now at the Farnborough International Air Show.

And the gam… sorry, the calculated risk thereof. Not a risk of safety – a risk of not being ready in time.

 

Here and now at Farnborough

Forgive me if I begin on a personal note. On this day I am helping with – or maybe just getting in the way of – the manning of the BLOODHOUND Centre at the Farnborough Air Show. And it feels weird to me. Because for the first time ever at Farnborough I’m on the wrong side of the fence.

All air shows have this fence. It divides Groundside from Airside. Airside is for aircraft, pilots, engineers, air traffic control, the KGB otherwise known as the Flying Control Committee, emergency vehicles, etc. While Groundside is for – well, people on the ground. The crowd, for a start. And of course in Farnborough’s case hundreds of trade stands manned by thousands of people, plus more tiers of corporate hospitality chalets than you can shake a cocktail stick at. If you went round half of them having a glass of bubbly in each you wouldn’t just be singing Auld Lang Syne, you’d be catatonic. Or more likely extinct.

For many, many years I flew at the Farnborough Air Show. And so of course I was always Airside. Today, I am not flying. Today, I have come through the ground traffic. So today I stand beside the BLOODHOUND exhibition and stare over the fence at my old Airside home on the far side of the runway.

Well, hey. Life moves on.

I turn back Groundside to the BLOODHOUND Pavilion. At which I know I am not being an awful lot of help. I have offered to serve behind the goodies counter, but BLOODHOUND’s genius-of-all-trades Tony Parraman has politely declined my assistance on the quite piffling grounds that (a) I cannot add up without taking my shoes off to utilise my toes, (b) I don’t know how to operate the till, (c) I don’t know where the stock is stashed behind the screen, and (d) I do not have the remotest idea how to operate one of they fancy machines wot accepts credit cards.

Shame on me, because I am actually standing in what might well be the most important exhibition in the whole of Farnborough.

Because the fact is that on one level the Farnborough Air Show is pre-ordained glitz. As are all the other major aerospace trade shows such as Paris, Singapore, Dubai and Berlin. (I cordially hated Berlin because unlike Farnborough it was a completely disorganised nightmare to fly at). All of these big shows trumpet major deals– airlines a and b have ordered x number of Boeings or Airbuses, air forces y and z have signed up for yea number of new fighters or UAV’s or transports…

How do you think this happens? Does Alphonse Allpockets, CEO of Mega Globe Airlines, stroll onto the Airbus trade stand and say: “Zut alors! Zat was ze display tres magnifique! Voila – we will purchase 70 of zem!  ‘Ere is mon chequebook!”

No, of course not.

Okay, you do get the odd order-book surprise – but far-and-away the majority of the big deals have been hammered out months before, with Farnborough chosen as the showcase for the big announcements and ceremonial contract signings by the Great and the Good. Whenever I’ve been present I’ve always had this sneaking desire to nick the ceremonial pen moments before the fanfare, just to see what happens.

 

Is it worth it?

Whether it’s actually worth the while of the big players to do this – appear at Farnborough, I mean, not nick the pen – is a question most aerospace manufacturers have asked themselves with furrowed brows at various times over the years, since having a major presence at Farnborough costs a very, very great many potatoes indeed. Some have even taken a deep breath and dropped out from some of the big shows for a year or two when they’ve been feeling either especially arrogant or especially pushed for potatoes. But in the end they all come back to the irritating boardroom conclusion that while they may not particularly want to do it, they can’t quite afford not to do it because their competitors are going to be there. So the major aviation industries of the world sort of blackmail each other into turning up, which is a cycle of human behaviour rather fun to observe.

The above is the truth – but not of course the whole truth. The other side of the 50p piece is that Farnborough may not be the place where the mega-deals are actually made – but it can certainly be the seeding ground for deals which might come to fruit in the future. All the world’s (well, most of the world’s) aerospace and offence – sorry, sorry, I mean defence, which just happens to be spelled p-r-e--e-m-p-t-i-v-e—s-t-r-i-k-e these days – suppliers come together in one place at one time. So a great deal of initial talking goes on. Some is inevitably hot air produced by a heady mixture of jet exhaust and champers and the perfumery of the hostesses in the chalets. (Or in the good old days when the Russians first came, de-icing alcohol from the jet fighters served up in a watering can and accompanied incongruously with the most delicious chocolates you’ve ever tasted – absolutely true).

So some are hot air. But some will eventually lead to an announcement at the next Farnborough. Or perhaps much sooner. Not necessarily of a multi-billion pound deal – but perhaps just a few million which will make all the difference to a much smaller project.

A project which flies a flag out of all proportion to its relative size, for instance. Call it BLOODHOUND…

Which of course is why BLOODHOUND is here. Well, that and education. I’ll come back to education.

Farnborough runs from Monday to the following Sunday. The first five days – well, really the first four days this year, which again I’ll come back to – are trade days, to which the public, theoretically at least, are not invited. The last two days – Saturday and Sunday – are the public days, when some 150,000 people flood in spending something like £4.5 million in gate fees plus further un-guessable sums on lumps of cow-pat tastefully presented between two slices of wet carpet and marketed under the generic heading of ‘burger’.

On this day, the Friday, the BLOODHOUND team are looking remarkably unflurried. Even chipper. Which I personally find quite astonishing.

Because I’m very well aware that BLOODHOUND’s presence here at Farnborough has not been exactly easy. In fact the logistics of the presence has been – not to put too fine a point on it – a very big calculated risk. In fact, quite a lot of separate calculated risks.

I will not go into details, because BLOODHOUND’s Jo Finch has most ably chronicled the saga in her recent article on the Farnborough effort.

 

The Enforcer…

But the bottom line is that for BLOODHOUND, just as for Boeing and Airbus and many other companies, the Farnborough Air Show is the Enforcer.

In BLOODHOUND’s case, let me explain. BLOODHOUND obviously depends on its life-blood – sponsorship. And as Richard said, I do know about sponsorship. More than enough to know the utter frustration of having a deal agreed by all the upper management executives, only to have it stall for an indefinite period because the last top Gods on High have yet to bestow their benedictory final signature to the document. This can take a quite inordinate period while the Gods on High do not have time to ratify it, being otherwise engaged in playing golf with Presidents and arranging such matters as buying up Lloyds Bank or perhaps Sierra Leone. During which period the upper management executives have half-forgotten the issue anyway, and are a bit apt to say “Eh, what?” when it re-surfaces at a board meeting.

May sound brutal, but that’s the way it is. And then when the God on High finally glances at it, says “Oh yes, fine” and affixes his Holy signature, then you, the sponsee – now down to eating tinned beans owing to a marked absence of cash-flow – are suddenly faced with procuring two or three new aeroplanes at £250,000 apiece, taking delivery of them and training up an aerobatic team, all within two months. So then the upper management executives say; “What’s the problem – you promised us this nine months ago”. And you try to explain; “Yeah, that was nine months ago – not two bloody months…!”

Not a situation Richard Noble has much patience with. In fact, no patience at all. So he announces a great big presence at Farnborough, actually talks Farnborough into paying BLOODHOUND to appear, rather than the other way round – a feat of hypnotism quite remarkable to me – and then says to the sponsors; “If you want to be part of this, sign the bloody sponsor contract!”

Which they do. Leaving BLOODHOUND with the gam… er, calculated risk…  that they can produce the results.

Shivery, that. BLOODHOUND is a most serious endeavour – but inevitably it walks a high-wire in funding. Now the high-wire begins to tremble. Only the fact that heavyweight companies are stepping on behind it serves to stabilise the gamble. A bit…

 

Looking at the calculated risk…

Well, I’m here in the BLOODHOUND Pavilion looking at the results. The stand is – well, it isn’t a stand, really. The marquee is – well, it isn’t a marquee either, really. More a sort of up-market circular glazed rotunda with a pointy top which would do credit to Kew Garden’s tropical section. The cogent point is that this is a big pavilion, and needs a lot to fill it up.
Well, the main thing that fills it is the first public showing of the full-size replica of the Car. And, er, not just the first public showing but also the first public mating of the newly-finished back end to the existing front end. Which is not a small job, but was achieved right here on the Sunday evening before Farnborough opened on the Monday.

Running it just a tad tight, that. As the sun went down on Sunday Conor La Grue and Sarah Covell finally finished putting the sponsors’ decals on the thing.

Phew. A re-run of the just-in-time drama which happened at last year’s Festival of Speed at Goodwood. [see From Outside the box July ’09 - To create something special] 

I find myself staring at the Show Car with absolute fascination. I know it is a faithful reproduction of how the final car will be shaped. Three arduous – so arduous – years of design research have led to this final solution. A solution which Chief Aerodynamicist Ron Ayers has described as “A shape I would never have imagined originally”. No criticism implied here – that’s what you do three years of research for. Three years of delays, frustration, financial switchbacks and heartaches. To find the right shape.

Well, now it’s found. And I’m looking at it. The crowds flooding through the pavilion are oohing and aahing at the enormous size of the Show Car. In true contrarian fashion I find myself thinking how not-enormous and in fact slightly ugly it is for the mighty task ahead of it. But it certainly does dominate the rotunda.

 

20,000 kids?

As do what looks to me like about 20,000 kids.

For this Friday is Futures Day at the Farnborough Air Show. Schools from all over the country have sent vast hoards of little darlings from the age of seven up to undergraduates so they can see for themselves – in between getting lost from their school parties – the attractions of careers in Aerospace, Defence or Security. They can follow a trail around the Show and win a prize. They can design their own jet engine or entire aircraft on-screen in the Futures Day pavilion.

And they can go the BLOODHOUND pavilion next door and drive a car at 1,000 mph. Which seems to be a massively popular thing to do.

For in a corner of the rotunda – if a rotunda can be said to have a corner – is the BLOODHOUND Driving Experience. You sit in a racing seat staring at a screen, and drive two 90-second record runs having to keep straight and at the same time whack in the jet and rocket at the right moments during acceleration. Then the airbrake, braking ‘chute(s) and finally wheel brakes also at the right moments during the slow-down. Andy Green quite rightly describes it as a sort of derivation between an Emulator and a Simulator [see the Bloodhound Driving Experience]. And yes, it does unquestionably have a faint whiff of computer game about it, having been simplified from the initially more complex version in order to make it driveable for such persons whose life-experience for some reason does not include flying jet fighters or driving Land Speed Record cars. (A fairly common situation among 10 year-old kids, for example). And yes again, its final development involved much midnight oil to be ready in time for Farnborough…

At this moment you can hardly see the thing because of the throng of kids, let in in waves, clustering round it like an audience at a public hanging.

Ah, but I know a thing or two. I wait until one school party is being extracted, and in the few seconds before the next one comes in, insert myself casually into the seat. I am fairly unlikely to be mistaken for a schoolboy, but possession is nine points of the law. (And it’s gotta be good practice for the distant day when I plop two large cushions into the real BLOODHOUND so I can see out, and then take it down the Hakskeen Pan because A Green is mysteriously indisposed owing to being shackled to a wall in a sound-proof dungeon…)

Well, I can tell you that the BLOODHOUND Driving Experience is actually a lot more difficult than it looks. When you settle in, put the headset on, and mash the right pedal to the metal (which you almost certainly won’t be able to do with such gay abandon in the real car) the first few seconds seem relatively pedestrian as the car ambles up through 100 mph, 200 mph – but somewhere about then reheat kicks in and things start to happen. Passing 230 mph you initiate rocket-idle – left trigger on the yoke – and seconds later, whipping through 350 mph, right trigger for full rocket firing.

Then… man, this thing goes…

And isn’t easy to keep straight. No, it isn’t. Prompted by Andy Green – who should know if anyone does – the team who put together the Driving Experience dialled into the software the sort of sideways excursions BLOODHOUND might be expected to make from the black line on the desert due to crosswinds or surface variations. So the Hound is constantly trying to sniff off to one side or the other, and regaining the line is most definitely not like cruising down a motorway. And the sensitivity increases hugely as the speed rises, which of course it will do – or to be strictly accurate, may do but hopefully won’t do so much – in the real car. And there is no ‘feel’ to the steering, which again is accurate because it won’t be there in the car either.

But it’s the speed-rise itself which is the real shock. I am well used to accelerating from 0 to 200 mph in 4 seconds – but that’s in an aeroplane pointing straight down. Simple – all you have to remember is to not keep pointing straight down. Accelerating BLOODHOUND from 350 to 1,000 mph – which takes maybe 20 seconds – is not simple. The bloody thing will not stay on line and things happen incredibly fast. When you reach the measured mile you actually flash through it quicker than you can say “Measured mile posts” – in fact in about 3.6 seconds. Then you have to instantly kill the rocket and jet, trigger the airbrakes at the cue-speed, hit the brake-chute at its bug-speed, and finally use the wheel brakes below 200 mph.

And then stop. In my case, with the brake temperatures firmly in the red and about a mile short of the awaiting phalanx of turn-around vehicles.

 

No visual perception

Well, of course, that’s all a matter of the graphics on the screen – no real visual distance perception at all. Not like real life.

Except that out there on the vastness of the desert pan there will also be no real visual distance perception at all. And it will be real life…

Hmmm. I may have to drive this thing a few more times before clapping the cuffs on A Green. To me the BDE lacks certain elements such as the mind-numbing shriek of the jet and rocket and the eerie howl of the transonic shockwave over the canopy. (Although when I mention this to Andy later he looks at me with his best deadpan face and says the soundtrack comes over fine in the headset, obviously with the decibels throttled back to Health and Safety limits. I can only report that to a geezer like me, with one ear dead and the other operating at about half-power, it only sounds like a bit of distant white noise. All the more reason why I should drive it, of course, because I ain’t gonna get deafened by it on Hakskeen Pan if I can’t hear it in the first place…)

But never mind that – I’ve proved I can hack it!  My mean speed over two runs through the Mile is 1,009 mph.

1,009 mph! I can do it! Yea!

I hop out of the seat. The next person in the queue is a crew-cut gingerish lad of maybe 11 years old. I try to offer him sage advice from an old pro but he obviously isn’t listening…

He clocks up 1,036 mph.

Ahem. Well, time I was moving on, anyway.

There is much to see. There is a sectioned EJ200 engine on loan from RAF Cosford which I find much more fascinating than the real thing, because now I can actually see what I don’t understand about it. I still don’t understand it of course, but at least I can see it and try to look wise, which of course fools nobody.

I can also visit the Promethean schoolroom in another corner of the Pavilion. This is showing – now I hope I’ve got this right – interactive educational whiteboards for the classroom. Perhaps because they are for the classroom – from which the kids have escaped for the day, or perhaps simply don’t want to lose their place in the Driving Experience queue – the Promethean enclave is not at this moment entirely over-stocked with youngsters. It is, however, most generously populated by their teachers, who seem very keen. I last went to school more than half a century ago, when classrooms used blackboards and the only interactive bit was when the teacher chucked his chalk at me for not paying attention. Given this background, an interactive educational whiteboard is about two continents beyond my electronic ability without an average 14 year old on hand to unscramble it after I hit the wrong buttons. (Rather like the way our home video doesn’t seem to function unless my daughter happens to be around, whereupon the bloody thing sits up and begs). But that doesn’t matter. The teachers think it’s the bee’s knees – and that does matter.

I sidle outside to look at the Supacat support vehicle.

This is one of two dedicated to the BLOODHOUND team for the duration of the Project, and at the moment is rigged up with three imitation replacement rockets, which nobody pretends is necessarily going to be anything like its final configuration. Staring at it I wonder what that final configuration might be. One – or more likely both – will almost certainly feature a crane. This for the rocket-change, lifting the car for a wheel-inspection, or most importantly heaving the car upright in an emergency. There have been, and continue to be, thoughts about turning BLOODHOUND round at the end of a run by lifting it on a crane and twizzling it through 180 degrees. If that option comes to anything then it won’t be a Supacat crane that lifts it. The Supacat weighs about 10 tons and the empty, un-fuelled BLOODHOUND weighs five-and-a-half tons. So yes, the Supacat could pick it up - but not on the end of a 7 metre jib, which is what would be required to rotate the car around under it. Be slightly embarrassing if the Supacat tipped up on its ass…

But what will the Supacats carry? Too early to finalise, but it will almost certainly be the rocket-change kit, two firefighters with enough equipment to knock down a major motorway fire-crash in 20 seconds, plus lifting and spreading gear to extract persons from vehicles terminally bent. Together with very considerable water tanks and pump for diluting an HTP spill, plus again a rather more benign unit to carry enough ice-cubes to replenish the cooling system of BLOODHOUND’s APU – the 800 hp piston engine rocket-fuel pump.

How will this turn out? I don’t know.

But the engineers on the BLOODHOUND team are the best in the world and they will certainly have that on their to-solve drawing boards – sorry, computer screens – to sort out a solution.

Umm – well, except that right now they are not at their computer screens. They are here at Farnborough.

Now this, again, is an exaggeration. They are not all here on this day. But BLOODHOUND is a small team. And Chief Engineer Mark Chapman is present, as are Richard Noble, Andy Green, and about half the rest of the crew. Inundated with kids and when not with kids, various TV crews who as usual take forever.

Here at Farnborough. Not at their drawing boards – sorry, screens – but here at Farnborough.

Part of the calculated risk.

 

Is the boost worth the sacrifice?

And it isn’t just Farnborough. On the previous Saturday and Sunday they were at the Royal International Air Tattoo at Fairford, and following Farnborough they’re off to the Royal Navy Days at Portsmouth next weekend. So when the last visitors have been tactfully exorcised at about 1800 hrs on Sunday the team will start packing up all the kit ready to move on. Not a small task. The show car for example cannot in all practicality be transported in one piece, and does not exactly fold itself up by whipping out a couple of split-pins. It takes three hours to dismantle, another three hours to mantle up again at the next venue, and significantly fails to leap up onto Graham Lockwood’s lorry of its own accord. Likewise the EJ200 jet, the BLOODHOUND Driving Experience electronic suite, and about a ton of merchandise. Not to mention the Supacat. All of it takes a very great deal of transportation, a very great deal of organisation, and a very, very great deal of effort on the part of the team. All of whom – okay, in relays to some extent – have been on the constant move from show to show for ten days now, have the next big one coming up four days after Farnborough, and another the weekend after that and the weekend after that. And for the duration of Farnborough have enjoyed the luxury of living in tents because there’s no hotel accommodation available within about a 50 mile radius of Farnborough during Air Show week…

Which is why, as I said earlier, I am so astonished to find them all so chipper and keen. If I’d been here for a week living in a tent with still a ten mile daily commute to Farnborough I’d have reached the point of wanting to kill someone, not talk nicely to them. To their everlasting credit the BLOODHOUND team still smiles.

But… a teensy snag is that if you’re doing the roadie bit out on the show circuit you’re not in the office designing the car. And if you are in the office you’ll turn round to Bill and say “Come and have a look at this”, only to realise that Bill is not among those present because he’s at Farnborough…

Okay. So this comes down to what is called nowadays a ‘value judgement’. Do you want your team firmly welded to their design computers in the Doghouse with calculations coming out of their ears? Or are you prepared to accept a considerable disruption in order to whack up public awareness, enthuse the sponsors you’ve got, and grab the attention of those you might get in the future? Is the boost worth the sacrifice?

Just exactly the question all of those aerospace manufacturers ask themselves…

It’s a value judgement. And like most value judgements, with a fair seasoning of risk sprinkled on top.

Well, all great adventures have a pivotal point – indeed, often more than one. And BLOODHOUND has had a good spring and summer. The aerodynamics – which were beginning to become a fully paid-up pain in the posterior, especially to those most closely involved – finally solved. The EJ200 test-run and proved-out. The educational partnerships gathering momentum like a snowball. Hampson Industries on board to build the back end frame of the car. Other new sponsors in the pipeline…

A pivotal point? Well, certainly a pivotal period. It’s been a bit like the great Chef said – although when it comes down to it I can’t remember which great Chef, being more of a tin-opener man myself – “Prepare slowly, then cook fast”.

And now BLOODHOUND is definitely nearing the Cook Fast stage – the actual car-build. So now the Project needs more staff than ever, more product sponsors than ever, and – surprise, surprise – more funding than ever.

So yes, pivotal moment.

And BLOODHOUND being a ‘flat’ co-operative organisation, it was universally decided by Richard Noble with no bloody arguments that Farnborough was the time and place to ‘go large’ – in spite of all the gambles about getting everything ready in time. Just in time…

And has it paid off?

Well, definitely looks that way from where I stand now. Very Important Personages from the Product Sponsors came, saw, and were conquered. Prince Michael of Kent came. About 150 schools came.

And the BLOODHOUND Pavilion is spang downhill from all they hospitality chalets, so they can’t help seeing this wingless fighter through their champers glasses. And so a lot of other VIPs came – some of them with potential Alphonse Allpockets resources, and good reasons to be interested…

We shall see. The big gam – calculated risk – was getting everything ready on time. Walking the high-wire. Not something you do on design of the Car. But something you have to do sometimes in business.  Into the amber verging on red as calculated risks go…

Is it working? Well, yes. The scorecard runs at:

Three new sponsors signed on the dotted line – Hampson, Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and Promethean.

The back end of the show car financed and produced from the Farnborough deal.

150 schools involved in the Farnborough Futures Day – a figure accelerated by BLOODHOUND.

£20k raised in merchandise sales (the merchandise being there all the time, despite the fact that I personally couldn’t find my way round them).

And the X-factor. X being potential new sponsors who came in and talked and want to talk again…

Yes, it was worth the – er, calculated risk.

Even if I personally still miss Airside.