Journal

Otto Lilienthal  

Homo Volans; The phrase occurred to me a few months back – and, Googling, I found a number of East European references to Faust Vrancic.  He was brought back to mind yesterday when I read about the exploits of the Swiss airline pilot and adventurer, known as ‘Rocket Man’, who is now significantly closer to becoming the first jet-powered bird man to cross the Channel – and saw the final programme in Andrew Marr’s excellent Britain from Above, in which he took to the skies below a giant parasail.

On the Rocket Man front, as The Times reported yesterday:

“Yves Rossy completed a 10-minute test flight last week with his jet-powered wing strapped to his back. He flew for more than 22 miles, equivalent to a flight from Calais to Dover – the route first flown by Louis Blériot in 1909. The test flight, which had been postponed several times because of engine problems, saw Rossy jump out of a small plane 7,500ft above the town of Bex, in Switzerland. Reaching 180mph, he flew through clear skies to Villeneuve and back. Rossy, wearing a heat-resistant suit similar to those worn by racing drivers, steered by shifting his weight or simply turning his head and shoulders. He deployed two parachutes at 5,000ft and 4,000ft to land at Bex airfield with two litres of fuel left. Rossy used an 8ft carbon-fibre wing powered by four jet engines.”

A sad concatenation, with the news of the Madrid air crash cheek-by-jowl with the article on Rossy.

Meanwhile, Marr’s parasail reminded me of the early experiments on parachutes and wings, including those by Vrancic.  He apparently collaborated with Tycho Brache and Johannes Keppler, was fluent in at least seven languages and is now best known for his book of inventions in Machinae Novae, published in Venice in 1595. Among his numerous inventions the most famous is the parachute, which he tested in Venice.

 Vrancic’s parachute

Whenever I attempt to sum up where we stand with Volans, the image that comes to mind is that of Otto Lilienthal, the early pioneer of aviation, whose exploits inpsired me to do several pen-and-ink drawings back in the early 1970s.

The image of Lilienthal that comes most readily to my mind

Sam’s shot of me at my desk   Charmian and JP Renaut after the SustainAbility/Volans London session   Charmian (Love) and I, with BlackBerries   Water cannon at the Water Conference in Stockholm   Dots of light on the wall as Sam and I confer at SustainAbility on Friday 19 August

Life is becoming a bit of a blur at the moment, mainly – I suspect – because my head is full of the various sections I am drafting for the new Volans website, due to launch early in September.  One thing we did recently was to present the latest developments at Volans to the SustainAbility teams, in London and Washington, DC. 

Meanwhile, Sam and I continue to hang out at SustainAbility for much of the time, because BT and others have been distinctly Stone Age in their wiring of the Volans offices in Bloomsbury Place.  Phones and printers are now stacked on the floors, but a glitch means yet another delay.  More positively, we have been building the Advisory Board at a rate of knots and now have some quite extraordinary people aboard, all to be announced in a couple of weeks.

This week kicked off with a flying visit to Stockholm, to speak on a panel at the Stockholm World Water Week event.   This was to launch the ITT Watermark.  Outside the conference centre, an extraordinary series of water cannon fired coloured columns into the air, though by the time I came out into the evening they seemed a little flacid and tired.

Apart from the endless typing away on the website content, I seem to be doing a fair number of telephone interviews at the moment.  It seems that despite the gathering clouds of recession various media are still intersted in the corporate responsibility agenda – and where it might take us next.

When I came into the environmental movement in the 1960s, the emblem of what we are losing that meant most to me was the humpback whale.  Later, in the 1980s, I played The Songs of the Humpback Whale – which I had bought way back in 1970 – to Gaia and Hania in the dark when they were very young, songs recorded by Dr Roger Payne.  For more on all of this, see Wikipedia entry.  Today, happily, The Times reports that humpback numbers are back up to around 40,000, suggesting that the magnificent creatures have managed to haul themselves back from the edge of the precipice.  But climate change, by impact ingthe evailability of food, particularly krill, could still reverse the process.

Spent the morning ferrying boxes of books from home – and from my desk SustainAbility – across the the new Bloomsbury Place offices of Volans.  Nice and bright when we started out, but by the time Elaine and I got to Bloomsbury Place the wind was fairly thumping through the trees there and in Bloomsbury Square nearby. 

Then we found I was missing one key of the front door set, so – while we sat on the steps in the wind with our boxes and no doubt looked like refugees to the steady stream of foreigners making their way to the British Museum, poor Sam had to streak across to let us and our pile of boxes in.  Nice feeling, though, to be building up the library in a building which the man who lives in the basement told us today dates back to the 1600s.

As we drove back through Trafalgar Square, a giant screen was showing swimming races from the Beijing Olympics, something I find excites me not a jot.  But it was nice to drive back along the Embankment and see the bridges, which I always find a delight.

Courtesy of BBC

Just watched Andrew Marr present two quite stunning programmes, on BBC1 and BBC2, the first on Britain from Above, the second on London ditto.  Seeing the pulsing webs of energy, telecommunications and road, air and sea traffic reminded me of the ecosystemic perspectives on landscapes and cities that first drew me to planning in the early 1970s – and then the Abercrombie Plan sequences in the London programme reminded me of some of the reasons why I fled the discipline once I had my M. Phil. 

The sequences of London’s Docklands at the same time prompted memories of my solo jaunts around the derelict docks, with my Leica M3, including one early morning horror where I found myself alone in an area of warehousing, triangulated upon by three guard-dogs – two Alsatians and a Doberman.  I had to stand in the same spot for an unconscionable time before their owner arrived to liberate me – and chastise me for trespassing.

The sequence of the Luftwaffe bombing the docks was extraordinary, with the aerial photographs catching one stick of bombs splashing into the Thames, but also reminding me of the stick that went along our road in Barnes – and of the day when Elaine was turned out of the house, maybe six or seven years ago, when neighbours digging a hole for a tree about five feet from our kitchen found an unexploded bomb from that same stick.

Some of the best television I have seen in a very long time.