August 09 blog

August 31, 2009: Is there an engineering gene?

I have recently had the pleasure of taking to the railways big time! First, my wife gave me, as a birthday present, a trip on a train drawn by a magnificent steam locomotive, the A1 Tornado. It was a 6-hour round trip down to and along the south coast, living the life of Reilly! It was great fun, especially when the coal-burning loco started and finished at Victoria to the background announcements that “Smoking is not permitted at this station”!

The original A1 locomotive was designed by Arthur Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway. It was planned to be the pinnacle of steam rail traction and forty-nine of the A1s were built for British Railways. As designed they were ideally suited for the post-war world of maintenance shortages and heavy trains; their huge grates allowed them to use lower grade coal than their predecessors and the final five were even equipped with roller bearings, enabling them to go for hundreds of thousands of miles between heavy repairs, making them the cheapest to run of all British steam locomotives in the same category. They were also the most reliable of all of the express passenger steam locomotives that were ever owned by British Railways.

The rapid onset of diesels in the 1960s meant that all of them were scrapped after an average life of only 15 years. The story may have ended there, had not a group of enthusiasts stepped in. In 1990, the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust was formed as a registered charity with hundreds of supporters and the backing of the best of British businesses, including William Cook Cast Products, Rolls-Royce, Corus and BAe Systems. The Trust took on the task of building a completely new 'A1' to the original design and with the help of the latest technology. Fitted with additional water capacity and the latest railway safety electronics, this A1 was to be fully equipped for today’s main line railway. The locomotive, numbered 60163, was named Tornado.

Interestingly, everything was made in the UK - with the exception of the boiler, which came from Germany.

It took £3m to complete the task! If you want to help this magnificent effort financially, or become involved with it visit http://www.a1steam.com .

A few days later we went by train to visit the Bath section of our family. As we reclined in our seats sipping drinks and speeding past the traffic stalled on the bordering roads, I thought that this was by far the best way of getting around. And then I began to think about my great-grandfather, who worked as a superintendent for the Great Western Railway (GWR also known as God’s Wonderful Railway) during the time when it was being converted from Brunel’s broad gauge to the technically inferior standard gauge. It was a strange feeling to think that a distant forefather had worked along that section of track and had lived in one of the railway cottages that we sped past.

When I took up engineering I felt I was being something of a traitor to a family line of military men. In fact, I now know that it was my father who deviated from a long line of engineers when he joined the Army, and in fact I was returning to the original family profession.

August 31, 2009: Is there an engineering gene?

I have recently had the pleasure of taking to the railways big time! First, my wife gave me, as a birthday present, a trip on a train drawn by a magnificent steam locomotive, the A1 Tornado. It was a 6-hour round trip down to and along the south coast, living the life of Reilly! It was great fun, especially when the loco started and finished at Victoria to the background announcements that “Smoking is not permitted at this station”!

The original A1 locomotive was designed by Arthur H Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway. It was planned to be the pinnacle of steam rail traction and forty-nine of the A1s were built for British Railways. As designed they were ideally suited for the post-war world of maintenance shortages and heavy trains; their huge grates allowed them to use lower grade coal than their predecessors and the final five were even equipped with roller bearings, enabling them to go for hundreds of thousands of miles between heavy repairs, making them the cheapest to run of all British steam locomotives in the same category. They were also the most reliable of all of the express passenger steam locomotives that were ever owned by British Railways.

The rapid onset of diesels in the 1960s meant that all of them were scrapped after an average life of only 15 years. The story may have ended there, had not a group of enthusiasts stepped in.

In 1990, the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust was formed as a registered charity with hundreds of supporters and the backing of the best of British businesses, including William Cook Cast Products, Rolls-Royce, Corus and BAe Systems. The Trust took on the task of building a completely new 'A1' to the original design and with the help of the latest technology. Fitted with additional water capacity and the latest railway safety electronics, this A1 was to be fully equipped for today’s main line railway. The locomotive, numbered 60163, was named Tornado.

It took £3m to complete the task!

August 29, 2009: Beware! You never know who’s listening.

The recent incident with our faulty telephone line threw up an interesting issue. It appears that the fault affected my neighbour’s line as well as my own, though neither of us realized it at the time. BT got me working quickly, but while they were resolving the problem with my neighbour’s line, she happened to pick up her ‘phone to check whether or not it was working. She was very surprised to hear me on the line, engaged in conversation with somebody else.

This sort of thing used to happen in the old days when we used to have shared lines but I really didn’t think it happened with modern technology. This incident showed me that my faith was misplaced. So, watch out folks! You never know who might be listening in to your phone calls!

August 28, 2009: Back again!

Having spent a few very pleasant days in the West of England, I came home to find myself isolated from the computer world by a line fault. Now, one of the problems of being an engineer in today’s society is that you are at the mercy of people who are trained and equipped to deal with the problems of those who have no technical background (and some of whom should not be allowed to even own computers).

It’s a bit like asking for directions to go from one place to another in London – places which you know are almost within sight of each other – and being told to take the Underground, change a few times, go up and down escalators and tunnels, to emerge a few hundred yards away. I picked up the ‘phone (which mercifully still allowed me to dial out) and, after responding to several exhortations to make choices by pressing one button or another, I ended up in dialogue with a very pleasant chap in Mumbai who asked me questions, probably from cue-cards. It didn’t matter that I knew exactly what the fault was, I had to go through it step by step. Now, it happened that I had a meeting to go to and I told the chap that I would have to leave my house in five minutes (actually I had 20 minutes in hand, but I am long in the tooth and by now fairly canny with things like this). This was met by the reply, “Oh that is quite all right, Mr Lindsley, this will take only ten minutes.” When I repeated that I had only half this time available, he tried to reassure me again. To give him his due, he did complete the process in five minutes, but ended up by saying it wasn’t a fault with my broadband service, but with the telephone line. He then offered to put me through to the other bit of BT who would deal with the problem from there on. When I said I’d now run out of time he gave me the number to ring when I returned.

This allowed me to start again with the fib about five minutes remaining available. Well, to cut a very long story short and after being passed from one person to another, ping-ponging between Mumbai and Gateshead, I was told there was a fault on the line – something I had known at the beginning! And within a few hours the problem had been resolved.

The fact was that I knew the fault was down to a card in the local exchange: very easy to change, and that would be that. But there is no way of saying “Look, I’m an electronics engineer, let’s cut the crap and get straight to the point. My line is faulty and you need to change the card in the exchange.” Oh no, you have to take the same steps that are carefully designed to guide the technically inept through the labyrinth of modern technology. Very frustrating!

Hence the delay. But I am now back in service!

August 21, 2009: How I earned a nickname

As I am not worked up about anything in particular today here, to hopefully amuse you, is a story from my early days as an engineer. It also serves to illustrate just how things have changed over the past four decades, in terms of airline security and in industrial health and safety considerations.

Forty or so years ago I was tasked to carry out some tests on a new design of flame monitor. These things are vital to the safe operation of large power-station boilers, which have several big burners producing massive flames. When one of these is being ignited it is vital that the safety systems “see” it and are not confused by adjacent flames or by those facing it, or by hot refractory, because if you pump in fuel and it doesn’t ignite properly it will collect in pockets and eventually explode.

Flame scanners have to operate in extremely hot and dirty environments, and the ones we had in the early 60s suffered from various problems, so we had developed a new design that promised great things. However, it needed to be tested before we deployed it in the field. Our parent company in Scotland had a test rig for burners, which looked like an enormous metal shoe-box. I can’t remember it’s size but it must have been around 30 metres long, 10 wide and 10 high. The burner was inserted at the small end and would fire along the greater length, exhausting to a flue at the far end. The whole thing was water cooled and when a burner was well and truly going there was a lot of noise and great clouds of steam rising from it.

I brought the new design of flame scanner up from London by air, carrying it with me on the flight because it was too valuable to put in with the checked baggage. Imagine these days trying to carry onto a ‘plane a long metal tube with a box of electronics at the end!

When I arrived at the test rig our company’s service engineer, who was meant to assist me, hadn’t turned up. He’d been delayed by traffic. We couldn’t wait; the rig had to be started anyway, so I set out my kit and watched as the things was set into operation. It was really spectacular – they were testing a new design of burner destined for the big oil-fired power station at Fawley which burned, as I remember it, four tonnes of oil per hour.

When the time came for me to aim my scanner at the flame and see how well it worked I got good readings from locations near the burner and from each side, which were small sight-holes in the face of the rig. But I also needed a reading from directly opposite the burner, and there were no sight-holes there.

Looking into the rig, I realized that at the end furthest from the burner the flame had risen clear of the floor and I reckoned I could get in there and survive, if they put a line of bricks up to protect me. This was done and I lay on the floor behind that wall (which, needless to say, began to look increasing flimsy to me as the time for startup approached). The operators keep a careful eye on me and started the test. One of them said afterwards that his hand was never far from the emergency stop!

I must be one of the few people who know what the end of the world could look like, and tell the story. The burner lit and the heat, light and noise was terrifying as a wall of flame rushed at me. But I was right, it passed above me. It was a hell of a sight and experience, in all senses of the word!

While I lay there taking my readings, the missing service engineer turned up and asked if I’d arrived. ‘Yes, he has,’ he was told. ‘He’s inside there.’

When he looked in through the port, all he could see was an enormous fire but just then the test came to an end and the burner was shut down. I scrambled through a small manhole and met his startled look. As I shook his hand he said ‘Good Lord! I’ve never seen anything like that. From now you are going to be called Meshach!’ (You may remember the Biblical story of the three who survived the fiery furnace, they were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.)

Every time I met him over the next few years, he would always greet me with ‘Hello again, Meshach!’

So that’s it. How I got that nickname.

(By the way, I shall not be adding to this blog for a few days, as I shall be on a family visit.)

August 20, 2009: Scuppered by Humphrys

On some days, writing this blog isn’t easy: I need to be inspired or triggered into action, and if that doesn’t happen I find myself wondering why I do it at all.

It started as a reaction to the garbage I came across in the media when they were reporting or commenting on something associated with engineering. I wanted to redress the balance and tell people the truth. Then people asked me to do something different, so my blogs sometimes wandered off into tales of my youth.

Either way, I need a daily stimulus. Very often this is provided by John Humphrys, the Rottweiler of the BBC’s Today programme – and this morning what do I find? A smiling, jokey, avuncular Humphrys! I’m sorry folks, that’s done it. I’ve nothing more to say. I'm going to lie down in a darkened room.

August 19, 2009: ….. and we pay these people!

Local Borough Councils have an essential role to play in our modern society, and we must all appreciate that their work involves cost and we must pay the price if we are to get good service. We wouldn’t mind so much if we believed that Council staff are doing their work well and keeping costs to a minimum, but over the past few days I’ve seen examples that make me wonder.

We have a local Community Association which publishes a newsletter and in the most recent edition it drew attention to the poor state of maintenance of paths and gardens around our library. This was accompanied by photographs of unkempt borders and weed-encrusted pathways. The article received an irate response from the council, on the lines that they had looked after the area and planted new shrubs. The problem, they said, was that these shrubs had died and not been replaced and in the meantime weeds had sprung up. That’s what shrubs and weeds do, guys! You can’t walk away and assume they’ll all stay neat and healthy; that’s what maintenance is about.

It make you hold your head in disbelief.

Then there’s the sad report this morning that Corby Council has decided to appeal against the court decision that it must pay compensation to children who were born with physical defects caused by pollution resulting from the demolition of the steelworks near the town. Look around you, guys! Look at those poor children and their long-suffering families. Look at what was going on locally when they were born.

We pay these people, and locally it has just been reported that over 200 of them are paid over £50,000 per annum, with a dozen or so taking home over £200,000 a year. The Council is defending itself by saying that the high earners are doing difficult jobs and carrying enormous responsibility. I’d love to see a comparison with commercial companies of equivalent size, where staff also carry great responsibility and do difficult jobs. A pie-chart would do the trick; one showing proportions of employees earning £20,000 - £50,000 and those earning £50,000 - £100,000 and so on. One pie-chart for a commercial company where if the employees don’t do their work well the penalty is dismissal or, ultimately, the collapse of the company; another chart with the same breaks, for a Council where if you don’t do a good job it seems you get promoted, and if the entire Council does a poor job it just demands more money from us.

August 18, 2009: Manuscripts, books and E-books

Sony is reported to have dropped its own standard for E-books in favour of the open ePub standard. This is an important move, if we are ever going to get to the stage where people switch away from traditional books to electronic readers. The multiplicity of incompatible formats made it unlikely that people would be willing to make the transition. Amazon are still not saying how many of their own Kindle readers or titles they have sold, and other proprietary standards are also in the critical fledgling state, so Sony’s decision is a important one.

But is this really the beginning of the end of traditional books? The world of booklovers can be divided into groups: those who are technological Luddites and will never switch; those who aren’t technophobes but who love the look and feel of traditional books (preferably heavy, leather-bound and deeply embossed); those who are happy to buy paperbacks and will happily switch once a common standard has evolved; and the geeks who aren’t really interested in reading novels and will gleefully rush to whatever new gizmo appears, as soon as it appears.

The traditional book is of course readable by any of these people. Because it has existed for hundreds of years you can pick up and thumb through the works of Chaucer or Shakespeare as well as those of J K Rowling. Whether you can actually read them or understand them is a problem of your own mind and education, not of the technology behind the production of the book. That was not so with E-book formats, which were mutually incompatible. As long as E-book rivals were battling it out for market dominance, no rational person would want to commit themselves to any one format.

All that the Sony announcement does is point the way to a common software standard. It’s as if the creators of word-processing software (like Word and WordPerfect) had agreed to merge formats. This would allow you to create and read documents across all platforms, but it won’t mean that the hardware will standardise or stabilise. Imagine that you were to be given a document on a 5¼-inch floppy disk (in that paper envelope – remember it?), what could you do with it? Unless you had access to an old disk drive, the answer would be ‘nothing’. Of course you could convert from one format to another, but who will bother? I’ve got documents going back decades which I know I will never read again because it’s too much hassle to get them transcribed to a memory stick or CD.

I’m not against progress and, as an author myself, I have some self-interest in any development that makes it easier for new writers to get published; but as the Print-on-Demand process (PoD) has shown, making it easier to get published doesn’t improve the general quality of literature. In fact it makes it possible for absolute rubbish to appear and it also holds back quality writers who are tempted to take the easy route and are therefore passed over, unseen by the big firms who do so much to publicise novels.

And for writers, I think that’s the crucial difference. A publisher doesn’t just publish, he aggressively markets and promotes the work. Whether you go the PoD way or by the E-book route, your work needs to be marketed if it’s going to be bought in any worthwhile quantity. You can bet your life that the Japanese companies will set up marketing departments – perhaps spin-off subsidiaries – to do just that. Unless the current publishers break away from the concept that they can make money only by putting piles of books on shelves they will surely fade away.

We have a way to go yet but I fear that, in the long term, the only bookshops that will exist in the future will be those that sell old books.

August 17, 2009: Education league tables

The Tories (who first introduced education league tables) are proposing to change them. The educational establishment has long complained that the league tables were actually reducing educational standards because they caused schools to bump up their ranking by pushing pupils into taking masses of easier subjects. The new proposal is for a points-based system, with subjects like science and maths earning more points than, say, media studies.

I’m not sure that this will achieve the aim, because it will still tend to blur the distinction between the number of ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ subjects being taken. Surely what people need to know is what proportion of a school’s exam entries is in each category. A statement like ‘Twenty percent of our pupils last year took Physics at A-level’, actually means something. One could even group subjects into what would effectively be ‘hard’, ‘medium’ and ‘easy’ classes, but because such classification would of necessity be subjective, they could be called Gold, Silver and Bronze. A school could then say something like ‘of the hundred pupils who passed A-levels last year, 20% were in Gold subjects, 30% in Silver and 50% in Bronze.

Of course, the academics (being academics) would each argue that their personal discipline was actually harder than another, so I’d suggest that the classifications should be made by a consortium of employer groups and trade unions.

Perhaps somebody will pass this idea on to Michael Gove, MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families!

August 14, 2009: More memories

Firstly, I must apologise for the recent lack of updates. They’ve all been prepared on time, but my hosting service has suffered some problems. Anyway, I’m back now!

And my return is full of memories brought back by an archive photograph is today’s “Times”. It shows trainee wireless operators from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force handling airborne transmitters and receivers The photograph shows the R1155 receiver and the T1154 transmitter (see http://www.vk2bv.org/radio/r1155.htm ).

When I was a lad I lusted after the R1155 receiver, but it was way beyond my pocket; everybody with an interest in amateur radio wanted one, and the prices reflected the demand. The T1154 was a different matter as it could not be legally used. I found one in a nearby second-hand junk shop, and negotiated the price down to ten shillings (50p). How I got it home I don’t know, because it was mighty heavy, but I got it there somehow and after much effort got it going – briefly, I insist.

It was a wonderful machine. The case was black crackle and the knobs were brightly coloured – red, blue and yellow. They drove variable condensers (as we knew them then) via sophisticated spring-loaded anti-backlash gears – which meant that when you pointed to a setting on the dial it would be exactly the same, irrespective of whether you approached it from the clockwise or anticlockwise direction. In side the case were a welter of valves and other components and one massive transmitting valve. Mine was an American one, I think, made by Eimac. I nearly electrocuted myself on it once because it operated at a lethally high voltage. I ended up presenting it to the electronics lab at Kingston Technical College.

August 12, 2009: The hazards of mercury?

When I was a tot, mercury was looked at in quite a different way from the paranoid view we have nowadays. At school we used to push blobs of the wonderfully shiny stuff over the lab benches, and watch it as it rolled about all over the place. But we also got amusement from it in other ways.

Living in a remote village, we had a lot of hens running around and, one day, somebody discovered that if you put a pellet of mercury in front of one of these birds they would rush up to it interestedly, peck at it, swallow it and move on to the next thing to occupy their bird brains. What we found amazing was the result a few minutes later. The bird’s gut, in trying to process the mercury, squeezed it and, mercury being slippery, this caused the pellet to accelerate as it moved through the gut. Very soon afterwards, there would then be a minor ‘pop’ and the pellet would emerge from the bird’s nether regions at an extremely high velocity. A silver rifle bullet that flashed across the yard.

As we rolled about on the ground in helpless mirth, another bird would peck at the mercury and the show was repeated.

Now, as far as I know it is entirely possible that I and/or my friends consumed one or other of the said chickens a few days or weeks later. OK, some would question the state of my mind today, but I am still here and, superficially at least, I am fighting fit. So I have good cause to wonder about the current fears over mercury. Oh, I know the tales of ‘mad hatters’ but that syndrome was due to extreme ingestion, the inhalation of mercury vapour. I believe that the liquid stuff is far less dangerous than people say.

Well, it better be. An old colleague of mine tells how he was sent to a pork-pie factory to deal with a flow transmitter that had become inaccurate. This type of instrument used a “Mercury-sealed Ledoux Bell” to linearise the output signal. My pal found that the meter had lost some of it mercury (a common enough phenomenon – mercury was, and still is, expensive stuff which can be nicked and sold by unscrupulous people). Anyhow, he refilled the instrument with mercury and left the site.

When he was called back a few days later, he found the instrument was again short of mercury. This time he looked closer and spotted a tiny hairline crack in the casing of the instrument, with a bright silver bead of mercury showing where it was weeping out.

He looked down in horror. The instrument was mounted on a gantry straddling a conveyor-belt bearing the factory’s products on their way to the next stage. Under the source of the leak the pies were merrily trundling along to the stage where the lids were to be added!

August 11, 2009: A ghost story

“A lot of your blogs are about engineers, engineering, and so on …” So went the comment, so here’s something different. It’s about the inner fears that lie just below the surface of anybody with any imagination – even an engineer.

I was brought up in a remote village high in the Himalayas, where there were few street lights and where hunger occasionally drove wild animals – such as panthers – to venture closer to human settlements. One was always very wary when venturing out into the dark. But that was long ago and far away, and you would have thought that decades of living in England would have convinced me that there was nothing larger than a cat or fox to threaten me. But those early fears were deeply ingrained and I still find the hairs on the back of my neck rising if I am outside in the dark and hear a rustle in the bushes.

Several years ago we lived near London in an apartment block which had a communal garbage disposal compound. Those primeval fears came to me one cold and foggy night, when I set out to take our kitchen waste to the garbage bins. As I left our warm, brightly-lit flat and stepped out into the street, everything seemed very still and eerie. The fog that swirled around me was so thick that the street lights cast no more than a dim glow, so that I could barely see the pavement.

Then, as I walked away from the door I gradually became aware of a quiet, continuous, snarling hiss coming from somewhere nearby. In spite of my efforts to exert some control over myself, my heart began to beat more rapidly and I slowly began to increase my pace, desperately trying to convince myself that there must be some rational explanation for the noise. But as I progressed the noise became more definite and louder and soon those deep fears were thoroughly aroused and beginning to fight wildly against my commonsense rationality. As I progressed along the street the snarling became even louder and seemingly nearer, and my heartbeat and pace increased correspondingly.

Feeling quite stupid, I risked a look over my shoulder to see if something was there. But there was nothing to be seen in the gloom: only the tendrils of fog curling in the wake of my by now fairly rapid progress.

By the time I reached the disposal compound I was moving as fast as I could without actually running and risking the indignity of being seen scampering away from an irrational fear. But my heartbeat and breathing would have given me away to anyone who had happened along; I was fairly panting by then and, in spite of the cold, sweating as I hurled my plastic bag of rubbish up into one of the big bins.

To my surprise the now very loud hiss followed the bag into the bin. Amazed, I climbed onto the platform and looked at the bag lying there on top of the other garbage, still hissing. I tentatively opened it and traced the noise to a large plastic lemonade bottle with the cap slightly loose.

Then I worked it out. As I had left the warmth of our flat, the cold air had hit the garbage and the air in the bottle had started to contract. Cold air had been drawn in through the loose cap, making a bubbling, hissing sound that I had mistaken for a snarl.

I felt a few years older and greyer when I returned to tell the story to my startled wife.

Grizzled old engineer? I sometimes think I’m just an easily-scared kid inside.

August 10, 2009: Engineering pay and status

A news item at the end of last week told us that trainee barristers could expect to be paid £60,000 pa while they were at University. Another reported that dentists took home £250,000 pa. These figures indicate the enormous gulf between the pay of engineers and that of other professions, and it’s hard to see any rational reason for this.

Professional engineers have to study hard at University level for at least four years, and then work for several years at a responsible level before they can become Chartered. The subjects that engineers are expected to study are, as I have shown before, much more difficult than those demanded by other professions. An engineer can hold enormous responsibility for public welfare and safety, and in many cases can be exposed to real physical risk and danger.

What justification could there possibly be for the lowly status of the professional engineer in society? I am convinced that the casual use of the title “engineer” in the UK has a lot to do with it. In the school my children went to one of the teachers was heard to advise a pupil not to take up engineering because he was far to bright and intelligent for such a lowly role. (I knew the teacher socially; she was charming and articulate, but airy-fairy and totally useless at everything she did!)

Unless the engineering profession tackles this, nothing will change. The pressure has to come from the institutions, but while there are so many of these – with the best-known being populated by academic stuffed shirts – nothing is going to happen.

Perhaps I ought to raise a petition on the Downing Street Website. If I do so, I’ll let you know.

August 7, 2009: CEGB bless ‘em!

I was talking to somebody a while ago about the Central Electricity Generating Board. He airily said that the CEGB “used to build incredibly expensive power stations”. This from somebody who, although working at a very high level in one of our present big power companies, had absolutely no idea of power-plant engineering!

I think he was wrong, and the fact that the bulk of our present supplies comes from power stations that were designed and built by the CEGB bears adequate testimony to the wisdom of their ways.

But I have to admit that the CEGB was by no means perfect, and towards the end of its time it made some pretty strange decisions. For example, when it decided that the time had come to use computers to control power plant, it looked around its own ranks and, seeing the accountants using computers, decided that it was they – not the engineers – who should lead the project. They decided that, instead of buying off-the-shelf systems from one of the many companies in the world who had experience in the business, they would grow their own. They set about writing software to meet their special needs – they named it CUTLASS – and expected the systems manufacturers to adopt it.

Of course, nobody had any real experience of this software in real-world applications, so the manufactures who went along with CUTLASS were at a disadvantage compared with their overseas competitors who had built up plenty of experience of their own software. They therefore found it impossible to sell CUTLASS-based systems overseas, and were at the same time rapidly losing their way with their own systems because they could not point to home-market installations to demonstrate their capabilities.

The CEGB had decided that by developing CUTLASS they would be open up the field of suppliers and enable them to break free from the small coterie of experienced manufacturers from whom they had traditionally bought systems. Suddenly, all sorts of people who had absolutely no knowledge and experience of power stations found themselves running major engineering projects. The old manufacturers lost out on contracts, because they built their prices based on known problems, while the new boys put in offers with no knowledge of the harsh realities of power-station operations.

And so it was that CUTLASS came in. It survived just long enough to see traditional UK systems manufacturers go to the wall because their home-market business had disappeared, while some of the new boys came crashing down in flames when they were overwhelmed with problems they hadn’t envisaged. Meanwhile, overseas competitors rubbed their hands in glee and walked off with major projects in foreign parts, using their own proprietary hardware and software.

Those are only some of the horror stories; I won’t even start on how the South of Scotland Electricity Board operated while this was going on and how some stations south of the border went their own way anyway!

So yes, the CEGB wasn’t perfect, but I still say that it was a hell of a lot better than the appalling mishmash we have now.

August 6, 2009: Winning hearts and minds

The closure of the wind-turbine blade manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight and the rumours that the Government is going to buy American engines for fighter aircraft shows the gradual erosion of confidence that we, the British, can make anything at all.

As I’ve said here before, when you close a factory or destroy an industry, with the best will in the world you can’t do anything to restore the spirit that was there when they were operating. Shopping malls may employ a handful of people, but the jobs are transitory and true wealth creation is absent. Service industries are fine, but unless wealth is actually created somewhere along the way their markets will gradually dwindle away. People can’t carry on feeding off each other. The money that people have available to spend in shopping malls itself has to be earned, and it is sheer foolishness if it can be earned only by working in other shops – all of which are selling products imported from overseas, which have to paid for with real money.

When industries are allowed to wither on the vine, people get tired, bored and restless and social problems like petty crime and vandalism flourish like weeds among the closed factories and their run-down surroundings. Keep beating people down and they will lose all spirit. Hearts and minds are lost, and before long this loss of confidence spreads way beyond the industries and geographical areas that were originally affected.

That’s something that politicians need to understand. They also need to do something about it, like supporting our industries. How about saying “we don’t care that those turbines can be made overseas, you won’t get planning permission for your wind farm unless all of it is made here”. And if the Europeans object, we know what to tell them.

August 5, 2009: The planet’s real problem

News from opposite sides of the planet and on two contrasting topics. In the UK, the Government is facing the embarrassment of missing its own targets for CO₂ reduction; in Indonesia they are predicting that the population of its capital, Jakarta, will more than double soon.

As I frequently say, increases in CO₂ and global warming are natural phenomena, in which mankind plays an insignificant role. Reducing our Carbon Footprint is a great mechanism for justifying increases in taxes and prices, but totally wasted as a planet-saving measure.

The real problem is population increase, and that really is down to us. We can actually do something about it, but won’t. If Governments around the world stopped chasing environmental butterflies and set about tackling the real issue – and if the misguided Greens let them – they would actually be doing something to improve the prospects for our children and grandchildren.

August 4, 2009: Airbus pitot tubes

After the tragic loss of an Air France Airbus A330 flying from Rio to Paris, I wondered if the cause was possibly a problem with the aircraft’s Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU) which plays a critical part in the automatic flight control systems. I pointed to several similar incidents involving this system on A330s and speculated that electrical interference could have been involved. A couple of the previous incidents had occurred near an military radio station on Australian soil below the flight-paths, and the Air France flight in June had been near a severe electrical storm.

Protecting sensitive electronic equipment against interference is a tricky business and depends on very careful design, construction and installation. One single, tiny mistake can completely negate the best of carefully-planned precautions.

There’s a principle called Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) which, in simple terms, says that an electronic device must be immune to the effects of interference from sources external to it, and that it must itself be incapable of disturbing other electronic devices in its vicinity. (If you’ve ever heard a crackle of interference on a radio or lost a TV picture when somebody starts a power-shower in your home you’ve had evidence that this principle is not always perfect!) The designer of a system can only do so much; beyond that, responsibility falls on the installer. Any electronic system will involve cables carrying sensitive signals from one point to another, and these need to be carefully screened against interference. For reasons that are far too technical to go into here, it is essential that the cable is connected to ‘ground’ in a very special way. In my business I frequently came across cables that had been incorrectly grounded by people who didn’t really understand the technology and its importance, and in each of these the system had malfunctioned when subjected to electrical interference.

In each of the systems I’d investigated it had been extremely difficult to identify the exact cause of the problem, and blame tended to be attributed to the main part of the electronic system, not to the cables connecting it to other devices.

The Airbus ADIRUs depend on information from pitot tubes which use the pressure of air impacting them in flight to calculate the speed of the aircraft. Although blame is currently falling on them for the June crash I wonder if this is correct. If interference had affected the ADIRUs (and I’m not saying it was due to poor cabling; it could have come in anywhere) it would have caused the flight controls to malfunction and even if the flight crew had tried to regain control they would have had a real struggle on their hands. In the incidents over Australia the crew succeeded but, in one of the cases, not before several people had been badly injured as the aircraft suddenly bucked and nose-dived.

We are told that the ADIRUs are triplicated and use two-out-of-three voting to deal with malfunctions. In such a configuration at least two devices have to agree on an action before it is taken; a single dissenter is flagged as being possibly faulty, to be dealt with later. Now, electrical interference can be a common cause affecting all three units, and in these extreme circumstances the performance of the aircraft could well result in all three pitot tubes freezing.

In other words, any evidence that the tubes had frozen should be treated as being possibly the result of the incident, not its cause.

August 3, 2009: Cutting the carbon footprint

Our local council prides itself on being amongst the greenest in the land. They march slavishly to the greens’ drumbeat and worship at the shrine of the environmentalists. However, they manage to send four vehicles round the streets every Friday morning. One collects the paper and card waste, another collects tins and bottles, a third collects refuse, a fourth collects compostable kitchen waste. Once a fortnight, this merry band of expensive, exhaust-emitting vehicles is joined by a fifth, which collects garden waste.

I find this amazing, but I’d be inclined to be a little more sympathetic if I didn’t believe that much of this waste is bundled together a little further along the journey to its ultimate destination. I’ve had relatives who lived in areas where much more sensible measures are taken, and I’ve lived in Australia where a single vehicle is used for this task.

I’ve also worked on a waste-to-energy plant which burns domestic waste in a very clean fluidized-bed boiler and generates useful amounts of electricity from it. Similar plants have been working successfully for years in countries that are considered to be very ecologically-minded, like Sweden.

But that seems to elude my council. I wonder how the ‘carbon footprint’ of their waste disposal schemes compares with the best.