I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (4 page)

I tried too, one still morning on Lake Iseo. All I managed to do in one spectacular turn was hurl half a hundredweight of melted snow water into the cabin of the helicopter that was filming me. Quite what this tells us, I don’t know. That I’m incompetent, or that the pilot was flying far too low – a bit of both probably.

What I do know is that of all the machines I’ve
ever driven, flown or ridden the Aquarama remains my favourite, the one I’d most like to own. Yes, an F-15 fighter jet would be a laugh but I couldn’t go anywhere in it, and yes,
Leander
, the superyacht, was spectacular but a bit of a bugger to run. Carlo’s wooden baby, on the other hand, has a real-world attraction.

It hits all the bases too. It’s fun, it’s fast, it is exquisitely made and when you’ve finished looning around and you’re back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself, ‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’

When you’re looking for the greatest spaceship ever made there are many choices, from
Discovery
in
2001: A Space Odyssey
to the
Liberator
from
Blake’s Seven
.

But really, it comes down to a straight fight between the USS
Enterprise
from
Star Trek
and the
Millennium Falcon
from
Star Wars
.

So far as speed is concerned, well, that’s a tough one. The
Enterprise
could tool along at warp nine, which appeared to be pretty fast. But is it faster than the
Falcon
in hyperdrive? It’d be interesting to ask Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, the men who created these craft, to discuss it over tea and buns, but this isn’t possible due to the fact that Mr Roddenberry is dead.

Obviously, with its photon torpedoes and its transporter room the
Enterprise
is by far the most sophisticated, but when it was destroyed in
Star Trek III
no one really shed a tear. They just built
another. The
Millennium Falcon
could never be replaced.

Plus there was always a sense that it was the
Enterprise
’s captain and crew who won the day,
despite
the ship rather than
because
of it. I mean, the lumbering old barge was hopeless against a cloaked Klingon vessel. And even at full speed the Borg cube had no problem keeping up. Victory was only ever possible because of the ingenuity of Kirk and co.

In
Star Wars
it was the other way round. Han Solo and his trusty sidekick Chewbacca were always out of ideas and at the mercy of yet another death ray when, lo and behold, the
Falcon
would get them out of trouble. This made it as much of a character as R2-D2 or C-3P0.

But that said, Solo was a bit of a boy. I mean, when Picard encountered an asteroid belt he nosed through on a quarter impulse power. Han, on the other hand, just floored it.

And let’s be honest, the
Falcon
was well tooled up. It had four turbo-lasers, a bunch of concussion-missile launchers and scanner-proof interior compartments for smuggling contraband. This, after all, is the purpose for which it was built.

It was won, in a game of cards, by Solo from his friend Lando Calrissian and then tweaked, customised and souped-up with a double-power hyperdrive system. Unfortunately, much of the after-market accessories were fitted by Chewbacca, a Wookiee, who was modelled on the director’s dog and speaks a language that’s part walrus, part badger, part bear and part camel. Not the normal qualifications one needs for rocket science.

This probably explained why the
Falcon
was forever going wrong. Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this too helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality. This is something I look for in all machines…

Once upon a time I was in a country far, far away doing some filming for the television. The story called for us to join a band of ex-pats and Arabs on a motorised fun run through the desert outside Dubai, so obviously we needed some vehicles. Naturally, I went for a Range Rover, leaving the director with a Jeep Wrangler and the crew with a Discovery. The producer took a Mark One Toyota Land Cruiser pickup truck.

As the day progressed it quickly became apparent that a bunch of media types weren’t exactly proficient in the art of desert driving. Those of us who had been ‘off road’ before had been taught to keep the revs as low as possible and use the engine’s torque to pull us out of trouble. Slowly, slowly, gently, gently was the key.

Well, it may be the key in England, where the ground is wet and there are tree roots, but it sure as hell doesn’t unlock any doors in the desert. Here if you let the engine’s low-down grunt dribble you along, you sink into the soft sand and that’s pretty much that.

What you have to do, I learned very quickly, is pretend you’re in a stolen Astra on a housing estate at midnight. Keep it in as low a gear as possible, weld your right foot to the floor and drive like you’re being chased by Darth Vader himself.

This doesn’t work either because if you go too fast, you crest the lip of a dune, find a sheer drop on the other side and can’t stop. So you slither down the slope and get bogged down in your own little avalanche on the other side. Or you rip a tyre off the rim. Or something important breaks. Either way, you end up as immobile as you would if you’d been crawling.

We made a sorry spectacle. The director going slowly because he had a bad back. The crew going slowly because the boot was full of delicate camera equipment and me going like a bat out of hell because it was fun. And all of us, ultimately, going nowhere.

All of us, that is, except the producer. His name is Andy Wilman and he is far from the best driver in the world. And yet, despite his fists of ham and his fingers of butter, he never got stuck once. This, we deduced, must have had something to do with his vehicle – the Land Cruiser pickup truck.

We were right. Even when it was up to its axles in powdery sand, that thing had enough grunt and enough traction to tow a bogged-down Range Rover. Nothing stopped it. No slope was too severe, no terrain too arduous. With its ancient diesel under the bonnet, its ladder chassis and its primitive four-wheel-drive system it was unstoppable.

It was, however, not pretty. I mean, the Mark One Land Cruiser pickup wasn’t beautiful when it was new. After fifteen years of hard labour it was a sorry spectacle, its knobbly tyres bleached grey by the sun and its silver paintwork dulled, scratched and streaked with rust.

Still, it was one of the best, most endearing and most lovable machines I’ve ever encountered.

We called it the
Millennium Falcon
.

The real
Falcon
was not beautiful either. When George Lucas was planning
Star Wars
he envisioned a sleek rocket, but his original design looked startlingly similar to craft being used at the time in the TV show
Space 1999
. So he went back to the drawing board, or rather the local burger restaurant.

It was here he got his inspiration. Yup, the
Millennium Falcon
was styled to resemble a burger. And the unusual, protruding control pod was modelled on an olive that Lucas saw peeping out of the bun.

The noise it made? Well, that was a recording of some experimental aircraft at the Oshkosh Air Show in 1976. And the battle scenes? Well, they were modelled on actual moves in the film
633 Squadron
. Especially the canyon-running in the final moments of
Star Wars IV
.

All of this helped create a sense of reality. But the icing on the cake was the model itself. Instead of being a titchy little thing on wires or a computer graphic it was real and it was big: five feet across and perfect in every detail.

That’s the thing though. It was a model. This small detail, however, seems to have bypassed those who still live with their mothers and spend their evenings in the attic, reading magazines about murderers. These people have got it into their heads that the
Millennium Falcon
was real.

By analysing the film, frame by frame, they’ve worked out that it’s 27 metres in diameter, with a thickness of 6.9 metres and a density of 4,000 cubic metres. Assuming that 95 per cent of this volume is air and the remaining material has the thickness of iron they have come up with the conclusion that it has exactly the same density as the USS
Enterprise
. Spooky.

One of them has even made this observation about the behaviour of the
Falcon
when it was hit by a burst of what, to you and me, is green light: ‘The rotational kinetic energy of an object is 0.51
²
at non-relativistic rotational speeds. Therefore 3.902E8 joules of rotational kinetic energy were added to the
Millennium Falcon
. However, the physics of collisions involve conservation of linear or angular momentum rather than the conservation of kinetic energy, which only happens in elastic collisions.’

So, the green light has no mass. It is pure light
energy. Interesting. And yet somehow not interesting at all.

Normal people didn’t watch
Star Wars
as an endless series of freeze frames. Certainly I watched it in one lump and I thought it was terrific. All those space fights between creatures from worlds so much more strange than anything Captain Kirk had ever discovered.

This was the joy of
Star Wars
. It took us on a mind-bending flight of fancy and yet we swallowed all the nonsense because actually the tale itself was as old as the hills. You had the evil lord fighting the princess and her band of knights. And stuck in the middle was Han, the lovable rogue, with his pet monkey/dog and his amazing, beaten-up spaceship.

Small boys everywhere know that in a fight between Superman, James Bond and the Terminator, James Bond would win. Well it’s the same story in
Star Wars
. In a fight between the
Enterprise
,
Stingray
,
Thunderbird 2
and the
Millennium Falcon
, the
Falcon
would reign supreme. It just would. The end.

It was 14 March 1939 and the Empire Flying Boat
Corsair
was already two days into its journey from Durban in South Africa to Southampton Water in England.

Nothing odd about that. This was a five-day journey back then because the plane would drop down several times a day for morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea. Flying was civilised in those days.

But then, on the leg from Uganda to the Sudan, everything went horribly wrong. Pilot John Alcock, brother of the more famous Alcock who’d made the first ever flight across the Atlantic, put the plane on automatic pilot and went back to dispense some bonhomie among the passengers.

He returned to the cockpit just as the landing zone should have been coming into view. But it wasn’t there. Assuming he’d overshot, he turned the plane around and retraced his steps but there was nothing below except jungle and swamp.
After four hours of flying and with just fifteen minutes of fuel left in the tanks he knew he had to find the straightest piece of water he could and try to get
Corsair
and its thirteen passengers down safely.

The waterway he found was barely wider than the plane’s wingspan but he made it anyway and had damn nearly brought the machine to a halt when the hull hit a partially submerged rock. With water gushing in, he applied full power and drove
Corsair
onto the beach.

No one was hurt and everyone was soon rescued and given shelter by a Belgian missionary who was quickly on the scene. Marvellous. End of story.

Except it wasn’t. The
Corsair
was the most modern flying boat around in 1939, and her owners were determined that they weren’t going to simply write her off and spend £50,000 on a new one. They decided that they would get her out.

The story is told beautifully in Graham Coster’s book
Corsairville
, but, in summary, she was mended once but crashed on take-off. So they had to mend her again, even though the war was in full swing back at home. This involved damming
the river and shipping in so many workers that a town had to be built. It’s called Corsairville and it’s still there today.

There is no doubt in my mind that this epic story, set against the background of war in Europe, would make a magnificent film. Having won the Battle of Britain single-handedly in
Pearl Harbor
, Ben Affleck would be the perfect quintessential Englishman, John Alcock. The Belgian missionary would be played by Jean-Claude Van Damme and his wife by Nicole Kidman. She gives good bodice.

Obviously, in the vast heat that is Africa, Nicole and Ben would fall madly in love. As he struggled to free the plane, she’d swoon at the muscles in his back writhing like a sack of pythons. He in turn would be mesmerised by her buttocks like ostrich eggs. Maybe Jean-Claude Van Damme could be eaten by a lion at some point.

However, no matter what happens or who they get to fill all the major roles, the star of the show would have to be the plane itself. The
Corsair
. Flying boats, you see, are just adorable. Partly this is because they were flying when flying was so glamorous, and partly it’s because they were jacks of all trades but masters, if I’m honest, of none.
They therefore have that most human of traits – a flaw.

The first thing you need to know is that they are flying boats with the emphasis on the word ‘boats’. They are not to be confused with float-planes, which are just normal aircraft that have flotation chambers instead of wheels. A flying boat really is a boat with wings; the underside of its fuselage really is a hull and as a result they are governed by all the usual maritime rules. They must, for instance, fly the flag of the nation onto whose waters they’ve landed.

When they first came along in the twenties they made perfect sense because airfields required all kinds of civil engineering and bulldozers, and it only took a brief shower to render them muddy and inoperable. In the twenties Heathrow and Gatwick were villages.