Aviation Tour - Maps on www.bankleft.com

There are a few interesting bonuses of having 'the plane' hereafter Oscar Lima, in a hangar on a private farm strip. The nissen hut next to the hangar turns out to house tanks, troop carriers, recovery vehicles. To be honest, I find them a little scary. Modern autonomous weapons must leave guys sitting in these things like total sitting ducks. I can try to imagine that at least they would be fun to drive but can't help dwelling on the number of people that must have been incinerated inside them. Maybe there was a magical tank golden era when their armour kept them untouchable and they could happily wreck and trash to the extent of their fuel and ammunition capacity. It is certainly a lot of steel, anyway. I don't think I've ever seen such a quantity of steel in one place. This one is powered by a variant of the Merlin engine that was in Spitfires.

Our build supervisor Gary, at left, is the premier Jabiru Engineer in the UK and has supplied a fair bit of development information to the Australian engine factory over the 10 year evolution of the power plants. He is a general all round champ. Murray, at right, is a plane painting guru. He paints war plane restorations and sponsored aerobatic planes but specialises in Jabirus. Being composite, there is a fair bit of work in the filling and finishing process - it is quite sculptural. I was amazed to see ours return from his workshop. He gets a bit cranky if you try to get him to work fast but he can certainly hang a final coat on an airframe flawlessly.

While waiting for paperwork, we have designed a house to build next year. It is a simple 120m2 pavilion with a flat white roof with wide eves, clerestory windows for natural ventilation plus insect screening and glass walls that fold open. Its flow is a combination of open plan living/kitchen/shaded outdoor deck, isolated rumpus and single bedrooms plus a separate study/master suite. By skewing it 90 degrees and placing it on the front half of the block, I hope to achieve one of my design aims of at least an oblique garden aspect from every room in the house. Rather than build an object in itself, we very much want the house to be unobtrusive and functional and to play to the advantage of the wonderful natural vegetation of the sub tropics. We have been investigating plant types (particularly edible ones) and looking at how we can phase the planting alongside construction to allow slower growing and sight screen plants to be established as soon as possible.

Best of all, we can construct it ourselves from simple standard components. The most significant problems at the moment (along side the ubiquitous and mundane funding and planning consent issues) are;

Acoustics - polished concrete floor, glass walls and exposed gal steel decking ceiling could end up nasty without some soft furnishings and some ceiling perforations to absorb and attenuate sound rather than reflecting it. Maybe in a play on the typical high energy solutions to design issues, we could just have a rack of active noise reducing headphones at the door.

Psychrometrics - I'd like a ground coupled floor slab via a heat rejection water pipe network but with humidity being a larger comfort issue than temperature on site, I'm keen to avoid condensation. I'd like to avoid traditional energy intense air conditioning in favour of natural ventilation from the bay breeze and this more passive ground coupling approach. I don't know if such systems have been used locally to date, I suspect that it is more of a central London commercial building approach.

Furniture Design - we would prefer to spend our furnishing budget on good quality wood rather than on someone else'd design and construction work so we are applying our DIY attitude to this too. The issue is that comfort might be tricky to achieve without multiple design iterations. We'll look into what works while in Scandinavia next month.

This is an early development sketch while we were working on the arrangement of the rooms around the courtyards that my two-overlapped-diamond design provides.

To allow us to camp away from the plane if necessary, Helen rigged this trailer to my bike. It will also act as a great fuel retrieval platform if we can't obtain AVGAS and need to fetch car petrol.

The economy class offering here at Bank Left Air;

This shot shows the front foot wells before rudder pedal installation. The funky door pockets should be great for storing sunnies, maps and energy bars.

The panel design and construction was one of the best parts of the build. After selecting and laying out the instruments, I cut the alloy sheet to shape, had it powder coated and engraved with each switch and botton's function, then installed the avionics and wired everything up. We took the opportunity to add navigation lights, stobes lights, landing lights and MP3 input. The 'glass cockpit' flight display integrates all primary flight data (airspeed, heading, altitude, engine parameters) with radio navigation and GPS moving map info. Snazzy. The 'steam guages' are backup. I have chosen to include an analogue electric turn coordinator with the two backup instruments required in the UK, airspeed indicator and altimeter. The turn coordinator is a whacky instrument if ever there was one - gyroscopically stabilized (old school, c.f. solid state accelerometer instruments), it indicates a combination of roll and yaw axis rotation which allows a fast response and a good indication of turn direction and rate without a visual reference outside the cockpit. Combining the two axis is a little impure and not much use for aerobatics. Good for its intended job of slothing around the sky at moderate bank angles I suppose so an ideal inertial reference backup for the Jabiru.