Flying with a Brompton

Let's show the ferret to the egg, and just to make things real spicy-like I decided to take my Brompton as well. How did I get along? Continue reading, dear reader, and I'll tell you, although I like to think that Celine Dion was watching out for me. Not just in Lucca, but for the whole trip. Yes sir.

She averted her eyes when I took a shower, but she was there just in case I slipped or the shower failed just as I had lathered up. She helped me choose clothes that would wow the Italians - not an easy task - and at the end of the trip she helped me pack my suitcases and waved me off. Bon voyage, she said, because she's Canadian and speaks French.

I don't need to thank you, Celine, because you are pure love and adore me unconditionally, but I would like to thank you anyway. Thank you.

I flew from Bristol to Pisa with EasyJet, but spent most of my time in nearby Lucca, which has a mostly pedestrianised walled city just across the road from the train station. I cycled around the walls and then through the old town.

What was the point of going abroad to cycle round in circles? Why not take the train to Swindon and cycle around in circles there? Or Basingstoke, which has one of Britain's few remaining Wimpys? I think I've answered my own question.

Back in May I bought a Brompton B75. It's a small folding bicycle. The B75 has a three-speed gearbox, old-style brake levers, fixed pedals, older components, no mudguards, no pump. It was launched in 2019 as Brompton's budget model. If you want to buy one now, you can't! Brompton sold the last of them in mid 2020. In fact if you want to buy a Brompton at all - any model - the company now has a six-month backlog.

The COVID crisis has been a huge inconvenience for many and a life-altering tragedy for some, but for Brompton and other bicycle manufacturers it has led to a boom in sales. Bromptons are tailor-made for commuting by rail or in the boot of a car, but they're also small enough to take on board an airliner as luggage. In theory they're also small enough to fit in the overhead lockers, but for any number of reasons I can't imagine an airline in 2020 agreeing to let me bring 10kg of hollow, folded metal bars into an airliner cabin.

Several companies, Brompton included, sell wheeled hard cases that swallow the bike and keep it safe. If you plan to drive or take a taxi to and from the airport I heartily recommend a hard case; I opted for a softer option partially because I didn't have time to evaluate a case, partially because (ironically) the most popular model of case had sold out in the UK, partially because I don't drive and didn't fancy wheeling a big heavy case to the train station and back.

Instead I picked a popular budget option, which involves a trip to IKEA to buy a couple of Dimpa bags:

The Dimpa is a big square storage bag. It costs around £3 and is exactly the right size for a Brompton, with the seatpost reversed:

One bag is strong enough to carry a Brompton but I used two bags just to make sure, and also to disguise the interior a little bit. I was slightly worried that EasyJet might refuse to take the bag if they knew a Brompton was inside it - they charge a flat £45 each way for bicycles but, off the top of my head, £20 or so for a 23kg bag - but no-one asked me what was inside the bag.

There's also the issue of baggage theft, but it struck me that the handlers would know immediately what was inside the bag no matter how I disguised it, and tying up the bag would be pointless because they could just carry the bag away. My bike's serial number is registered with Brompton, admittedly not much use if it turns up in Indonesia, but still.

The Ingredients List

Two Ikea Dimpa bags

A yoga mat

Several squares of bubbly insulation material

Half a roll of gaffer tape

A pair of removable pedals

~

Ingredient number two was a cheap yoga mat from Lidl. I wrapped it around the bike, although in this picture I'm just using it as a mat while the bike does a down dog:

It's terrible, isn't it? I didn't get around to buying a thicker mat. It struck me that the two most likely hazards would be slow crushing under a pile of cases, in which case even the thickest yoga mat wouldn't help, or a sudden impact from a case sliding corner-first into the bike, in which case a yoga mat still probably wouldn't help much.

The Brompton's basic design is surprisingly well-protected from impacts around the edge. The saddle, wheels, seatpost bung, and suspension bumper protect the top, bottom, and right-hand-side (as in the picture above). The main chassis fold is protected from hyperextension by the rear wheel pressing against the crossbar.

However the front folds look vulnerable. In particular the little clamps that hold the bike together look as if they might bend, so I unscrewed them. Even if they were just slightly bent the bike would be unusable, and where would I get replacements? I suggest you get hold of a small bubble-wrap bag to store the clamps, otherwise the grease will go everywhere:

At this point I rustled up some makeshift impact pads. I used a bunch of insulation material I had lying around:

Why did I have all of this insulation? In late 2019, in the Before Times, I bought a Trangia portable stove. I wanted to make a pot cosy that would keep the Trangia's thin aluminium pots warm in subzero temperatures, because 2020 was going to be the year I visited the arctic circle. The year I was going to visit the arctic circle twice! Was.

In this photo I've just used a tiny bit of gaffer tape. I'm mocking it all up for the cameras; in real life I used lots of tape, and taped up the tape that so that the pads would stay in place. It's surprisingly hard to tape up a Brompton. I didn't want to put tape over the cables, because I was worried that I might pull them loose when I removed the tape, but threading the tape between bits of the bike was tricky because tape is sticky.

Still, for the next step I took out the pedals. The B75 comes with fixed plastic pedals, but most Bromptons have a folding left pedal (the right pedal doesn't stick out). I bought some removable pedals from a company called MKS. They're nifty:

They come in two pieces. An adapter ring screws into the crank, and the pedal slots into the adapter. In order to remove and replace the pedal you have to pull back the ring and pull out (or push in) the pedal. The system works surprisingly well, although the pedals and too awkward and too greasy to remove if you're just carrying the bike around casually.

After rehearsing all the above at home I then went to the airport, pushing the bike along beside me, with the yoga mat and gaffer tape etc in the Dimpa bag, hanging from the handlebars. It was disconcerting to see Bristol Airport transformed into Combine Overwatch Bristol. My flight left at 06:30 so I had plenty of time to assemble the package, which I had to do outdoors because the landward side of the airport was closed:

Off the top of my head it took around twenty minutes. I used some gaffer tape to keep the bag upright while I slotted the padded Brompton into it, then did the same with the second bag. Carrying the assembled bag was difficult, but I managed to fit it over my shoulder, and I only had to move it short distances at a time.

At Bristol the staff asked me to use the oversized baggage belt; at Pisa they didn't. I should really illustrate this part of the article with photographs of the interior of both airports, but the overall military look of Bristol disconcerted me (Pisa, on the other hand, has not changed much).

Pisa.

Whilst on a plane I wondered if my Brompton would make it intact. This added a welcome note of drama to what would otherwise have been an unexciting flight. The Airbus A320 has a pressurised hold, but at least on the flight from Bristol to Pisa the hold wasn't heated - the Brompton was still cold to the touch when I assembled it outside Pisa airport. This didn't appear to affect the bike in any way.

Pisa is one of the few major tourist destinations in continental Europe that has an airport right at the edge of town. It's at the end of a major street that leads almost directly to the train station. The leaning tower itself is just on the other side of the river. When EasyJet say that they fly to Pisa it is, for once, not a lie. They actually do fly to Pisa.

Pisa itself is very modest, but it's a short train ride from Lucca, Barga, Florence, and the Cinque Terre (in that order):

And also Genoa and Siena if you are so inclined. As of this writing Italy is one of the few places that British people can visit without being quarantined at either end of the journey, but for how much longer?

An Aerial Tour of Hong Kong, Courtesy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

It takes twelve hours to fly from London to Hong Kong, which is roughly the length of time it took me to install Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Then I spent another twelve hours tweaking the graphics and working out how to use the drone camera, and also redefining the keys.

On the positive side I can now visit Hong Kong again, without having to quarantine myself for fourteen days.

In a nice touch the cockpit displays in the external view are the actual cockpit displays, and they seem to update in real time. In fact one performance tweak widely shared on the internet involves reducing the refresh rate of the glass cockpit in order to improve the game's frame rate.

FS2020 is a technically demanding game. It requires a fast network connection and a speedy SSD to stream textures from the game's servers, and a fast CPU to take all the texture data and photogrammetrically-generated cities and shove them into the GPU while simultaneously updating a complex flight and weather model in real time. It can also stream live flight information, so good luck if you're on 56k.

Unlike most games FS2020 laughs at a fast GPU. It laughs at a fast GPU because the whole system has to be good, and I wonder if it will spur a mini-boom in PC hardware. My PC is essentially one step above the minimum requirements - a Xeon 1275 with a Geforce 1650 - but with medium-high settings it runs decently well at 1080, albeit that it tends to stutter when loading new areas. These screenshots were all taken at 1080 and downsized.

Let's take off from Hong Kong International Airport and do a counterclockwise circuit of Lantau Island.

Down there is Tai O, which has a bunch of houses on stilts. FS2020 has two pause modes. One of them is active pause, which freezes the plane in flight but keeps the world active, and the other is just plain pause, which by default is unassigned.

I found to my surprise that active pause freezes the plane but continues to apply physical forces to it, so if the plane is in a dive it quickly overspeeds and falls apart, even though it's not actually travelling through the air.

I was most amused by this and chuckled softly to myself as I took off again and flew over Tai O again but this time using just plain pause to take the screenshots.

FS2020 has an addictive weather system that lets you change the time of day and cloud cover by moving a slider back and forth. The screenshots above were taken in the exact same position, but with the weather tweaked because I didn't like the look of that cloud. You know what? When I was a kid I wished that 3D games could render the world out to the horizon without pop-in or distance fog. I grew up in the countryside and I'm used to seeing long distances. Operation Flashpoint could render huge distances but on the whole it's not something that developers have ever prioritised, so thank you Asobo.

Let's proceed to Kau Ling Chung beach. I've been there! It's that little beach, down there:

Technically the beach in the distance is Fan Lau, because we're looking the other way; the big rectangular building in FS2020's screenshots is Fan Lau Fort, which is an empty shell in real life. That's one of the limitations of building a world entirely from top-down images, but more of this later.

Proceeding around the coast the next major landmarks are Tai Long Wan and Shek Pik Prison. Lantau Island is swarming with massive spiders, and I suspect the prison was put there because the inmates would be too terrified to escape.

The prison is visible off in the distance - in the image above the aircraft is over Tai Long Wan, which is the spit of land sticking out into the sea.

Let's cut across the island north, to Shek Pik Reservoir:

FS2020's water is good, although I wonder if the game scales it up so that it's more noticeable. Its combination of roads and texture details isn't as good, but then again you're only supposed to approach the ground twice per flight.

Proceeding north the next landmark is Ngong Ping, which has a giant Buddha. There's also a cable car that leads down to Tung Chung, although that doesn't appear in FS2020. It would have to be hand-made, and it would probably play havoc with the AI pilot.

Does FS2020 model spiders? Not as far as I know, but perhaps it's a surprise. Like in Rescue on Fractalus, where you land and the pilot turns out to be an alien who smashes open your cockpit window. Those trees down below are full of spiders. No, mother, they aren't frightened of me. They aren't frightened of me at all.

Let's proceed to Hong Kong itself:

FS2020's airport coverage is surprisingly patchy. Earlier versions of the game had a limited number of handcrafted airports, but FS2020 draws mainly from Bing Maps' data pool, which has gaps in its coverage. Stuttgart Airport is deliberately censored, so it doesn't appear, and Seychelles International Airport is missing apparently because Bing's aerial footage of the Seychelles is obscured by clouds.

Let's check out downtown Kowloon. Compare the following two images, from FS2020 and Flight Simulator X (2006) respectively:

The blue tower in FSX's image is Langham Place, in Mong Kok. FS2020 has a building in the same location, and it has a bit of detailing, but it's obviously not the same thing. Let's proceed over the Star Ferry terminal, in a completely different aeroplane:

Beyond the graphical detail, the difference is again obvious - FSX has a handcrafted terminal, albeit that it's very crude, whereas FS2020 relies on clever manipulation of satellite data, complete with two-dimensional boats. There's a gap in the market for a third-party recreation of Hong Kong.

Let's proceed to Hong Kong island:

Both games have Central Plaza, which is the building with the golden detailing and the pointy bit on top. The two games also have the Convention and Exhibition Centre - it's the structure right at the bottom of the FS2020 image - but curiously FSX has it where Happy Valley racecourse should be, off in the distance there.

Reversing the order of the images, both games have the Two International Finance Centre - it's the tall, highly-conspicuous building near the waterfront - but only FSX has the distinctive, polygonal Bank of China tower. FS2020 has generic skyscrapers instead. I wonder if there was a copyright issue?

Let's fly up to the peak and try out the weather system. As a nod to contemporary politics I have put the white bread Anglo-Saxon weather - clear skies, daytime - at the end of the first batch of images instead of at the beginning because I don't want to imply that clear skies are normal and other forms of weather are "the other".

The game's night-time views are surprisingly drab, but otherwise FS2020 is a visual feast. FSX was striking in 2006 but was launched just on the cusp of the modern age of shaders and extensive post-processing, so it hasn't aged well:

In particular the lack of shadows makes everything look flat. That reminds me. One fascinating aspect of Microsoft Flight Simulator is that it has a simulator-within-a-simulator, because several of the planes have a Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system. The G1000 is a combined instrument panel, autopilot, and navigation system. FS2020 even has a little SD card plugged into the unit, a nice visual touch:

In fact I realise now that FSX's version of the G1000 (bottom) also has an SD card. I hadn't noticed that before. Garmin sells a G1000 emulator for home computers so that trainee pilots can brush up on their skills, but after using Flight Simulator's version for a while I think I understand the basics. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I can't think of another game - outside the flight simulator world - that has a detailed simulation of an actual computer as an integral part of gameplay. 

But that's enough of FSX and the G1000. Let's check out Kai Tak and Chequerboard Hill:

In the picture above the former Kai Tak airport sticks out into Victoria Harbour on the left, Chequerboard Hill is just below us, and the glidepath into Kai Tak is on the right. Pilots had to make a sharp descending right turn to line up with the runway because, for a variety of reasons, they couldn't just fly straight in (the winds made a south-to-north approach difficult and a combination of hills and the Chinese border made a north-to-south approach infeasible).

Kai Tak was decommissioned in 1998. Nowadays the far end is a cruise liner terminal, but the area just inland is still a giant construction site. FS2020 models Kai Tak with bumps, but in reality it's flat. Here's what it looks like from the far end, looking back at Hong Kong:

One thing FS2020 doesn't model is the rash of skyscrapers that were built on the glidepath after the airport was decommissioned and the height restrictions were lifted. But that's enough of Kai Tak. I have the impression that Hong Kong is always looking forwards, never back, so let's fly off to Shenzhen, just across the border with Hong Kong's New Territories:

The river marks the border, and also the extent of Shenzhen's sprawl. I wonder if one day Shenzhen will cross the river and gobble up Hong Kong. Then Hong Kong will be a district of Shenzhen. Who can tell.

The Y-shaped fork in the river is Lo Wu, the final stop on the MTR, and the point at which people cross the border. Bing and Google Maps both have satellite coverage of the Hong Kong-China border, but for technical and political reasons the streets are all over the place. I decided to fly left a bit and check out Window of the World, a theme park in Shenzhen. I've been there as well! It's mind-boggling.

Thankfully the People's Liberation Army Air Force didn't object to me flying across the border in a light aircraft.

FS2020 retains the basic shape of the theme park but not the recreations of global landmarks. In the image above the photogrammetric engine has made a decent job of modelling the entrance plaza and its fountain, but the miniature Eiffel Tower just behind it is a flat X-shape.

And with that I decided to land at the nearest airport, but not before noticing a van moving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth beneath me, trapped in a loop: