How we used to fly, KLM

[mikeeskriett]

Hi,

Aside from various British and american cars one of my other interests is classic british aviation from back in the days when we made things. I picked up a few photo albums the other week belonging to a chap who worked on trials for Vickers and De Havilland on Comets and Viscounts. One of the albums has his journey back via KLM's Champange Service having been testing the Vickers Viscount on tropical trials in 1955. Amazingly you could have an fine array of complimentary ciggies in first class!!

[manifold]

back in the day before toss pot governments decided that they would regulate the living daylights out of anyone who dare design and build anything here

[mikeeskriett]

Yep the list is long of meddling, lapses of fore sight and misjudgement

TSR2 - criminal scrapping still reckon there was a dodgy deal done there.
Trident - could have been a world beater but ended up with small engines and a ground gripper nickname, still an awesome bit of engineering
VC10 - Downsized and under invested, cracking piece of kit and my personal favourite could have been the orginal A380 style jet
Harrier - Should have carried on with the supersonic version.

More unsung heros

Blackburn Buccaneer
Vulcan
Victor
Hunter
BAC 1-11
Concorde
Britannia

So many more. Then there's the avionics autoland for example I have the controller for the original and best Smiths SEP5 in my collecton weighs a ton but they managed to stuff a massive amount of kit in there it's amazing.

Cheers,

Mike

[Alan D.]

back in the day before toss pot governments decided that they would regulate the living daylights out of anyone who dare design and build anything here

I flew microlights for a time ( and piper warriors). There were a few British planes, most of the clever stuff was foreign. The CAA costs for checking out your evolutionary design, that you had designed and built in your garage, I imagine now would be about £500 per hour. The Wright brothers couldn't do it now!!! That's why we don't do little aeroplanes in this country! As a parallel, when the Domino Pimlico (fibreglass Mini beach car) went pop, somebody acquired the moulds, with the idea of starting production again in a modified form. I watch their website for a time, until the notice came up saying, we cannot carry on this project due to the onerous health and safety costs! How do you start a cottage industry?

Makes the IVA look cheap!

[manifold]

Yes, the dickheads that run this country, I call them that, because that is what they are, plus with the additional overhead of EU regs means we would rather offshore everything to somewhere in the east, where health and safety isn't so much an issue and costs are a lot lower and regulation in gerneral is less.

End result....these other countries get to produce, manufacture and probably design too shortly a product which will probably dominate the future markets. How are we supposed to possibly compete with that? Only if your a massive company that can afford the costs....and they are getting fewer by the day.

Not a chance of cottage industries setting up then. What they forget is that all these big companies were all cottages industries once.

I can see the day when the Govt will be pulling existing kit cars off the road as not having been 'certificated'. What a sad day that will be too.

Health and safety too. When you need to do a risk assessment before you start doing a job and if you don't you can get fined. No such thing as common sense. Or using being able to demonstrate best practices to cover having to keep doing a risk assessment every single time.

Why the hell can't they see that is what is happening. Its a complete shambles what is happening now.

Rant over.

[Hans Efde]

I say REVOLUTION!
Thank God we have a new government in Holland now that is trying to decrease the number of civil servants and the number of regulations for companies. They understand that companies are the engine of the country. Our previous left wing governments were fond of importing as many useless immigrants as possible (aka voters), having a huge overhead in administration (come aboard everyone, free money, just keep a chair warm and stare out of the window the whole day) and take as much tax as possible from working people and use it to subsidize all sorts of useless foundations and art stuff. These people are completely blind that someone has to earn the money they are spending. A sort of Greek government. Hopefully this madness is stopped now in Holland. Although yesterday I saw on the telly a local government making the life of a webshop difficult to confront them with 42 years old regulations. Internet did not exist that time, so how can a webshop comply with ancient regulations? Luckily these dinosaur governators will be extinct soon. I wish you all the luck in Britain something similar will happen.

[mikeeskriett]

The wonders of excess regulations. I remember when we had common sense and if you saw a hole in the pavement you just didn't walk into it you didn't need 14 signs and a flashing light. We have a cleaning company here who put up these small wet floor warnings which people keep tripping over some irony there. Thanks to the litigous society we live in, I work in travel and Disney are being sued at the moment because they supplied hot cheese with some nachos, apparently it was supplied in mug style pot and the family took it to their table and their kid knocked it over and he got burnt so they have decided that it's Disney's fault...and not that the parents put it in reach of the kid and they didn't keep their eye on it.

When they were developing the TSR2 they had a commitee of something like 12 people who spent weeks deciding where some switches should go and finally decided only to be told that the pilot could not reach them in the location chosen.

[manifold]

.......12 people who spent weeks deciding where some switches should go and finally decided only to be told that the pilot could not reach them in the location chosen.

............Just about sums it up really.

The question is, who is the authority who knows what it is they need to regulate? Is it the person that knows about it, because the do it day to day, or the detached committee, made up of educated idiots? Minds filled full of facts, but no common sense.

[mikeeskriett]

In my experience it's normally the people who are in the know that are excluded from the process. Just because you can regulate something it doesn't mean that you should.

If you regulate the common sense out of the world it removes peoples resilience and ability to think on their own. I wonder how darwin would approach this can you halt evolution by removing the risk in life if we're not at risk how will we evolve to counter unexpected events.

That said there are some dense people in the world I work on some fairly major Travel websites and we do have customers who complain that they can't book with our site. One irate caller complained that we wouldn't take payment and that she had plenty of funds etc etc etc we checked with the card processor and for the name on card field she had written "HSBC Master Card"...hope to god she doesn't drive!!