Measurements Lighter Than Air

I have too many Interests. Too much to do, too little time and money to do it all.

Why am I writing about my interests? There is a connection, trust me. In this past week, I’ve written two articles about different measurement devices in use by the United States armed forces. Specifically, CMMs in use by the navy and an automated optical scanner in use by the army. In both cases, they are used largely for measuring parts of helicopters.

If there’s one relevant thing I already knew before getting to know the world of metrology, I would say that it’s this: the tolerances in the aerospace industry are incredibly tight. My experiences so far in researching and writing on metrology reaffirm this. So it’s a good thing that I have a reasonable interest in aviation. If you hear a helicopter flying around and you don’t crane your neck to try to spot it, you’ve lost a lot of playfulness in life. I remember being overjoyed during a lockdown stroll when for the first and only time yet, I saw an RAF Chinook flying around. Therefore, it pleases me greatly to have been able to find a cool picture of a navy helicopter to use as the thumbnail for the article I wrote. It’s the little things that make most jobs enjoyable and so far, I’ve found little things galore working this position.

Beyond the ‘oh look, a helicopter!’ and very much enjoying the new Top Gun, I don’t know all that much about conventional aircraft. However, as my colleagues have discovered from my incessant rambling over this past week, I do know a fair deal about airships. I have multiple books on the history of airships, and I often wish I had lived in a time when I would have been able to fly in one.

To my great delight, there are quite a number of companies trying to bring back these behemoths of the sky. They’re all in various different stages of production, from concept drawings all the way to working prototypes. In fact, there are so many companies attempting to bring airships into the 21^st century with vastly different, high-tech approaches that I can’t list them all here. So hopefully I will get a chance to fly in one someday.

The reason airships were on my mind again is precisely because I was writing about the use of CMMs and optical scanners for the aerospace and defence industries. With such tight tolerances in everything connected to aviation, I was sure that I would be able to find metrology-relevant news from one of these airship companies. But it seems that there is none. What I did find is that LTA Research’s Pathfinder 1 is made to maintain the vintage silhouette, but constructed of the most modern materials such as titanium brackets and carbon fibre composite rods for the rigid frame. LTA is using 3D printing for some of the manufacturing process, which means that my colleagues from TCT will probably get to write about it before I do.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) recently announced that they’ve chosen South Yorkshire as the location where they will be manufacturing the Airlander 10, of which they had a successful working prototype and the first order of 10 is going out to a Spanish airline by 2026. So obviously I’m thinking I need to book a holiday to go to Spain in 2026, but South Yorkshire is not that far from where our office is based… So maybe HAV will welcome me for a site visit to their metrology department? And obviously if they happen to have a test flight with the space for an extra passenger on that day, I would be more than happy to help out filling that space. 

But to pull my head out of the clouds for a minute: I’m slowly approaching a full month in this position and I’m beginning to realise a few things. My initial perspective of the industrial metrology sector was that it all seemed terribly overwhelming; that I would really struggle to understand a lot of the concepts, or that it would take me a long time to get to know the different companies in this sector. I’m starting to be more familiar with the big names, and I can quite happily say that I’m doing well in understanding the technical terms and the processes used in industrial metrology. The other main thing I’ve realised is something I had been hoping for: I can find my own interests in this work. I never expected that I would be in a position where I could write about airships, yet here I am. And I can guarantee that I will take any opportunity I can to write about them again.