Rob

To be sure, to be sure

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@MCCCANM @WaileaGolf Rude not too!

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@MCCCANM Say no more!
https://t.co/ufA71honsH

[Critically Thinking & Drinking 🧐 🥃🧉🍸🍹🤪 @TheCriticalDri1]

The perfect bottle opener doesn't exi...

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@elonmusk
You know what to do!
Have a great weekend

[Paul Weston @PWestoff]

A one minute silence for Henry Nowak from the English football team in LA later this month is being admirably proposed by fashion designer @jeffbanks_uk. What a wonderful man Jeff so surely is. Please re-post this far and wide. Copy in @Keir_Starmer!!

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@MCCCANM Brother! This is what a great day looks like, she is watching and will be chuffed to bits you’re doing something you cherish - family and downtime
Missing pictures of the RC cub building and she will be keen to know when a 1/4 scale stearman is going on the building board 👍

[aircraftmaintenancengineer @airmainengineer]

Long live the Queen 👸✈️

[Breaking Aviation News & Videos @aviationbrk]

WATCH: Pilot of Spirit Airlines Airbus A320 N652NK did a wing wave while departing from Las Vegas to Marana for long-term storage on Friday.

Video: @MatthewMel71455

[Aviation @xAviation]

Boeing 707 low pass at Mashonaland Flying Club Air Day in Harare Zimbabwe back in 1995. First pass was around 400 knots at extremely low altitude followed by a second slow pass at 125 knots with flaps 40. Seeing a jet that size moving that low and that fast is unreal.

📹: Rory Standish-White

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@MCCCANM Brother! Never truer words… now where can I book a table?

I tip in bottles of cold beer

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter Is this before consumption El Herbo or after?

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@elonmusk Thoroughly decent chap too 👍

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

This is hard, kids. Real hard. Can you appreciate the touch on the controls necessary to be this smooth, this close?

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter Shite! I hope this doesn’t mean yav bin in the catering facilities conjuring up a rather large portion of filth food?

We all know how that’s going to end

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter Looks like an excellent outing Herbetta!
How come you were lying on the floor so much gawping at ceilings?

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter @notthemessiah73 This will explain why you sit down for a piss in there with the cat on your knee

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter It’s a toss up up between the yoooof and the piss bottle

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter Jesus! The debris field this Monday will be shocking, poor bloody cat.
I’d leave the windows sealed to prevent polluting the immediate vicinity with the stench & noises as you clearing your O ring
BTW have you confirmed the yoooof is involved with this reported ‘cult’ in Crewe

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@POTUS: "Honoring the British King might seem an ironic beginning to our celebration of 250 years of American independence — but in fact, no tribute could be more appropriate. Long before Americans had a nation or Constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea."

[Boeing Defense @BoeingDefense]

A new era in naval aviation takes flight!

The first @USNavy MQ-25A Stingray™ has completed its first flight, demonstrating its ability to taxi, take off, fly, and land autonomously.

MQ-25A will extend the carrier air wing's reach by providing unmanned aerial refueling.

[Rob @FiveThreeNorth]

@HBrubanter World class choice there Herbster, cannot fault any…

Need Midway in there so you can shout Banzai out of the bedroom window when you see the split links up the road