I grew up around airframes — close enough to learn that a
mechanical system tells you what it is, if you read it
carefully. The math came later, when "the airframe flies that
way" stopped being enough of an answer.
From there the through-line is short. The same instinct that
learns to read a small airframe in turbulence learns to read
a residual histogram; the same one that traces an N54
misfire learns to read a y⁺ map. Different substrates, same
way of looking — and I keep the bench busy on all of them.
Engine teardowns, ignition resets, cylinder borescopes;
E-series BMWs and Mooneys see most of the bench time. Pilot
training continues. The espresso machine is
its own small control problem. None of these are hobbies in
the decorative sense — each keeps a different muscle of the
same engineering instinct warm.
That instinct lives in three places on this site, and reading
across them is intentional. Work carries
the finished projects — what survived the bench.
Notes is the bench itself, with the
answer not yet settled. Worlds is the
rest of where the instinct is at home: foothills under a DJI
pass, an E-series in the bay, an espresso machine learning
to be repeatable. Each room leads to the others.
Coursework, teamwork, and independent work sit on the same
shelf for the same reason. UTIAS taught me to take the
discretisation seriously; UTAT made me build twice; the
bench keeps me honest about what an analysis can and cannot
tell you about real hardware; CFDLab and the cluster are
where I keep all those lessons sharp in private. Work
catalogues the public artefacts — the connection running
underneath them is the part that doesn't appear on any
one page.
