Madeleine v the Tapas Restaurant

Before I move onto the meat in Madeleine v the Tapas Restaurant, let me divert into a titbit of information regarding dogs.

https://www.newdognewtricks.com/ This person has started following my blog, so I had a quick scan of the site in the link. In brief, It explains how to train your dog, quite possibly in things that you have found difficult to achieve to date. So have a look for yourself.

My own interest in dogs is more specialised, as I focus on the selection, training and testing of cadaver dogs. I have a backlog of at least a dozen real-life cases in the category, themed ‘the dogs don’t lie’.

So now let’s move on to Madeleine v The Tapas Restaurant. It has reopened recently. In this incarnation it is called Izakaya-Luz. Its advertising is woeful. Its Facebook page has had just over 50 views, and it tells you diddly-squat. Google pins it to Rua Direita, which is not where it is located. At the moment, it has no advertising outside its real location to tell you where it is or what is on the menu.

Izakaya is Japanese for tavern, pub, or bar. There are at least 2 other unconnected izakayas on the Algarve, which explains why this one has to be called Izakaya-Luz. It is located inside the Tapas Zone of the Ocean Club, and non-members can once again wander through the interior of that zone. In fact, it is between the previous Tapas Restaurant and the Tapas Zone swimming pool.

It is strictly al fresco at the moment. Don’t ask me why, because the weather is a bit blustery at this time. I have no idea how they handle toilet facilities, or where the chef cooks. Algarve downpours have ceased by now and we are into the dry season. So I suppose that is one less problem.

The ‘owners’ are an English couple. The chef is Japanese, has worked on the Algarve for something like 8 years, and has gained a reputation as cooking better food than most. The menu is Japanese cuisine, and my wife and grandson rated it very highly. So it is on my list of things to do, planned for the near future.

They had 5 different dishes, each small, which they shared. My beloved described it as “Japanese tapas”. So the Tapas Restaurant has now reincarnated as a Japanese Tapas Restaurant.

However, the next event in our life coming up is my wife’s birthday, and she has her heart on an Indian curry. My tapas adventure will have to wait.

Madeleine v Vodafone Lagos

In this final Vodafone cellphone graphic, I have adjusted for the presence of Vodafone Lagos.

Engineer Sotero pointed out that cities have more than a single mast, and Lagos definitely has several for Vodafone. Trying to map all of these precisely adds nothing to this approximation exercise, mainly because I am having to estimate greatly for what I know about line-of-sight considerations. Although the graphic suggests clear handover boundaries, the reality is almost certainly quite different.

Luz Vodafone is shown in red, and the Almádena transmitter is in yellow. Bensafrim is in purple, with the transmitter itself too far north to fit on the graphic, so it shows up only as a couple of boundary markers. For Lagos, in blue, I have simplified to a single transmitter near to the marina.

Just like Luz, Lagos is semi bowl-shaped. It runs down a significant descent on its western side from high up to reach sea level. (It happens to be flat to the east, but that does not impact this analysis.)

Adding the 3 neighbouring cells has shrunk the Luz Vodafone coverage area considerably below the 5 to 8km potential range noted by engineer Sotero.

On the eastern side of Luz, I have shaved the boundary down to allow for the Boa Vista escarpment. This is an estimate based on line-of-sight consideration, but as Lagos transmitters also suffer in this way, it is more guesswork than precision.

The graphic does correspond to the PJ Files record re transmitter contact sequence. On the way out to Portimão and Faro the order is Luz – Almádena – Lagos – Bensafrim, with the reverse on return journeys.

As explained in a previous post, Espiche and its campsite are possibly out of sight of the Luz transmitter, while Burgau almost certainly is, and Budens most definitely is.

The road (M537) from Luz running east towards Lagos via the Valverde campsite is, in my opinion, definitely within the Luz cell, due to line-of-sight considerations.

Both Monte Judeu (the German ‘orphanage’) and Portelas (the residence of Euclides Monteiro) are outside of the Luz cell.

Although the Luz cell has shrunk considerably, it is still extensive. All of the bars and restaurants within Luz itself lie in range of the Luz transmitter. Notable additions to this are those locations running up Valverde. This includes the Valverde camping site, and also quite a range of locations around that vicinity.

To summarise, the phone call made to Christian Brueckner on 3rd May is not sufficient to place him in the vicinity of the Ocean Club. And even if he was nearby, there are many valid reasons for that.

Madeleine v Luz Vodafone

The Christian Brueckner story kicked off with a revelation that he had received a phone call which placed him in Luz perhaps an hour before Madeleine disappeared.

But where did the phone call received by Christian Brueckner at 7.32pm on 3 May 2007 pinpoint – where was that mobile located?

The Luz cell dump, the phone data captured for the period 2-4^th May is 74,104 texts and messages, spread across the 3 operators in Luz, namely Optimus, TMN, and Vodafone. The phone call made to Brueckner was from Vodafone to Vodafone, so we can forget about the other two suppliers.

The information captured in the Luz cell dump is pay data – what you get billed for. It does not include network control information – what I personally think of as pings.

Because we have no ping data, we cannot tell when Brueckner switched his phone on, or if he switched his mobile off. Those would have generated network control pings.

Equally, we cannot tell when Brueckner entered the vicinity of the Luz Vodafone antenna or when he exited it, because we don’t have those pings.

So knowing that Brueckner received a phone call is a lot less than we could tell if we only also had access to the network control pings. But we don’t and life must move on.

Another total distraction is German prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters intimating that Christian Brueckner could be placed inside or beside the Ocean Club. That is pure nonsense.

There was no fourth tower in Luz on 3 May 2007. Brueckner was communicating via the Vodafone network.

The GPS coordinates for the Vodafone tower happen to resolve to an Ocean Club villa, very close to apartment 5A. But there was only one Vodafone tower in Luz and it was not in the Ocean Club. As we’ll see, this type of misplacement really does not matter a jot. Vodafone does not care if you are right next to an antenna or somewhere in the distance. The only question is are you in range?

Another potential red herring is Wi-Fi. Luz did have at least one Internet café in 2007, and from memory, a number of Wi-Fi hotspots. Not a single one of those would have turned up in the Luz cell dump. So although I’m fairly sure the Ocean Club did not have Wi-Fi in 2007, it does not matter. The phone call to Brueckner was on Vodafone, pure and simple.

Triangulation is another red herring. You need two base points (transmitters) to triangulate with a third, your mobile and yes it can work, because that is what the network does. So 2 Vodafone transmitters and one Vodafone mobile will do the trick.

The wheels now come off the triangulation bus. The Luz cell dump is for just one Vodafone transmitter, and it does not contain any network control pings required to permit triangulation.

So, what did ‘range’ mean in 2007? Precisely?

For various technical reasons, there was no ‘precisely’ about it in 2007. Just ‘approximately’. So let’s try ‘approximately’, using information from the PJ Files.

The Luz cell dump of 74,104 messages doesn’t even contain useful information about the approximate range of coverage, so the following is a starter for 10.

Let’s try a radius of 5km and map that. Here it comes.

The large red dot in the centre is the Vodafone transmitter in Luz. Then there are 3 smaller red dots for the limit of range, to the west, north and east.

This very simple approximation already raises some interesting points.

The first draft extends westwards to include Burgau. São Miguel is probably excluded. Almádena and Espiche are within range of Luz. As are the camping park sites at Espiche and in Valverde (Orbitur).

To the north, the range is nearly to the M535, and that puts Monte Judeu on this fringe.

While to the east, the Luz transmitter is competing with neighbouring Lagos. This alone suggests that a more refined map, showing surrounding Vodafone towers, might be an improvement.

There are two ways of improving this map. First, somewhere on the Internet, there is a file of all the transmitter sites that existed in Portugal back in the day. This shows that Vodafone Luz had one antenna pointing roughly west and a second pointing roughly east towards Lagos. Perhaps I should make my diagram more squashed NS and more stretched EW. But it’s simply not worth the effort.

The second is to use other parts of the PJ Files, parts which DO show network control pings, to map the Vodafone towers of the Algarve.

That’s for the next instalment. To keep you amused in the mean time, here’s a photo of network control towers at Monza, 2020, for the Italian Grand Prix.

Madeleine v The Hunt for the Prime Suspect

The Hunt for the Prime Suspect was a 1-hour special on ITV. It aired on 23 Jul 2020 and was presented by Julie Etchingham. Its focus was the German suspect, Christian Brueckner.

You either saw this or you didn’t. I don’t intend giving a summary of the entire programme. Here are some choice cuts.

The programme raised the Luz phone dump. It was obtained in the first week or so, if the programme is correct. It contains 74,104 calls/text messages going in/out of Luz on 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th May.

Let me turn to how a standard cell worked in 2007. Each cell has 3 suppliers, with each supplier getting 1/3^rd of the bandwidth. Luz had Optimus, TMN and Vodafone. Each supplier had a mast of its own. That leaves no room for a suggested 4^th mast, located within the Ocean Club. Such a mast never existed.

The number linked to Brueckner is a Vodafone number, as is the number calling him. That means we can ignore the Optimus and TMN traffic to focus on Vodafone.

Returning to The Hunt, it clarified one point. Brueckner owned a disused factory in Germany and it was suspected of becoming a dumping ground for waste. A police search of the factory discovered a shallow grave. The grave held 8 removable computer media, containing 8,000 photos and videos. The bulk of these were child pornography, although a minority were of Brueckner himself.

Two experts gave their opinion on this stash. The first clarified that this type of offence is not considered serious within Germany, and that Brueckner would have been sentenced to no more than 3 years if found guilty. The second expert stated that the sheer size of the stash indicates that Brueckner was obsessed with child pornography.

There was an appeal in 2013 on German TV by Kate McCann, Gerry McCann and DCI Andy Redwood. Presumably it was linked to the October 2013 Crimewatch appeal in the UK. The German appeal produced the name of Christian Brueckner. He was talked to by German police, but nothing was found to link him to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Subsequent events show that Brueckner was not on the radar of German, English and Portuguese police, until 2017. If Brueckner was involved, he had 4 years advance warning.

Next was a 10^th anniversary programme which aired on German TV in 2017. Christian Brueckner was in a bar in Hanover with a friend watching the programme, and proclaimed that he knew about the case. The conversation was overheard by others. One of these people was sufficiently concerned about the conversation to report it to the police, and to identify Christian Brueckner. It was at this time that the Germans started an investigation as his name had been reported twice. One need was to place Brueckner in Luz at the time Madeleine disappeared.

The Germans checked the Luz phone dump for pre-paid phones. One such number was linked to Christian Brueckner, though it was not made clear how this link was achieved.

The Germans are looking for the person who called Brueckner’s phone on the evening of 3^rd May 2007. The Germans want confirmation that it was Brueckner who answered that call, not someone else. They would also like to know what was discussed.

This may be problematic. According to Alexander Stevens, an accomplice would get 10 years, so it is unlikely anyone who is involved will come forward.

To secure a conviction, one needs a body, witnesses, or a confession. None of these are likely in the instance of Christian Brueckner.

The Hunt emphasised 2 deadlines. One was that Brueckner might be released on parole in the near future. The other was that Portugal has a statute of limitations on all serious crimes, including murder, of 15 years. That will expire in May 2022.

The programme omitted to mention that Germany has no statute of limitation for murder.

The following graphic is one that I did in April 2015 re Smithman. It covers premises that were open in Luz around 9.15pm to 10.pm. Green means those establishments were definitely closed, red means definitely open, and orange means I hadn’t proof one way or the other. I have added a large blue dot and V to indicate where the Vodafone mast was on Primeiro de Maio.

First, there was no need to invent a 4^th mast within the Ocean Club. The Vodafone mast is close enough, but that proves nothing. The mast’s range extends far beyond Luz itself.

Second, Christian Brueckner could have been in a vast number of premises, with a bona fide reason for being in Luz.

These take us back to the need to verify that Brueckner was on the end of that call, plus what the call was about.

Madeleine v Rocha Negra

http://www.cmjornal.pt/multimedia/videos/detalhe/jovem-de-16-anos-morre-apos-cair-de-uma-falesia-em-lagos

A boy of 16 years old fell to his death on Tuesday, 29 May 2018, from a height of 100m on the cliffs above Rocha Negra, between the beaches of Porto de Mós and Luz.

Multiple authorities were involved in attempts to try to rescue him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene of the incident. Due to the difficulty of the terrain, his body had to be retrieved by sea.

He was with a teenage girl at the time. Presumably she was the one who raised the alarm. It is unlikely that a passer-by would spot a body at the bottom of the cliffs, based on personal experience.

The beach at Porto de Mós is much quieter and less touristy than Luz. Heading west from the Porto de Mós beach is a wide, flat, baked earth track. It starts a sea level, but surprisingly quickly ascends to the top of the cliffs. The track itself is 100% safe, because it is around 3m away from the edge of the cliff. You have to deliberately go over to the lip of the cliff before you are in danger.

The track runs from the beach at Porto de Mós to the trigonometry point on the hills overlooking Luz. The track is busier than one might think, for all sorts of reasons.

One is that ramblers like to do the walk from Porto de Mós to the trig point. The path is flat and the incline is fairly gentle, so it is an easy walk. An amble that is pleasant all year round. Then you come to the trig point above Luz, south of Bela Vista, and an opportunity for a chocolate box photo over Luz. The media love this as a special viewpoint.

From the trig point you have choices. One is just to do an easy amble back to Porto de Mós. Many pick this, because it is the simplest option.

If you wish instead to get down from the trig point to Luz, you have 3 alternative routes. This same choice would have faced Kate and Gerry McCann when they went jogging from apartment 4G, where they had been rehoused by Mark Warner at the Ocean Club. There are 3 routes up and down the hill. One route is a nightmare, one route is not joggable, and the third looks bad but it turns out to be easy. Mountain bikes go up and down it regularly.

I have no idea which route Gerry and Kate took.

The details of the 16 year old boy who died in the cliff fall are at best sketchy. Most of what you have in this post is local knowledge of Luz and its environs.

Madeleine – Netflix #1 update

Bar Carib is a bar/restaurant located in the west of Luz. It is the only facility in a very large area of Luz. It has the advantage of ample car parking, which is useful as the area is hilly and many of the ex-pats are no longer spring chickens.

Bar Carib is the dot in green. It is fairly close to the circle in pink, which is 27 Rua das Flores, the villa used by Kate and Gerry McCann when they left the Ocean Club. The map layout is a little confusing at this scale, because it looks like there are several car exits from 27 Rua das Flores, but many of these are pedestrian-only. The reality is cars go via Rua dos Hibiscos.

If the McCanns went jogging from 27 Rua das Flores there is a good chance they ran up Rua dos Hibiscus, and if so, they would have passed the sign for the Bar Carib. For all I know, the McCanns may have used it as their local.

Other than this sheer speculation, I have not heard of any connection between the Bar Carib and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. At least until now.

The yellow dot on the map is apartment 5A, close to Baptista supermarket (and the Tapas Restaurant). The blue dot is the Millennium, around a 650m walk from apartment 5A.

The orange dot beside the Millennium is the Mirage. It gets a couple of little mentions in the PJ Files, with possibly two more flying under the radar.

The owner of the Mirage is David Jones, co-creator of Fireman Sam. The Mirage has been closed since 2014, because it was losing money. Mr Jones was in the Carib recently, and the locals do enjoy a good gossip when they socialise.

Mr Jones said that he had indeed been in touch with Netflix. He told them that he had no significant knowledge regarding Madeleine’s disappearance. In my opinion, he is in error on that point, but I assume he does not know the slivers of gold he is sitting on, like many a person in this incident.

His interview with Netflix was restricted to whether Madeleine’s disappearance had an impact on his business. Since I was not at Bar Carib to hear his story first-hand, I will simply say he does indeed think there was a Madeleine effect, a very detrimental one.

If you look at the map again, the Mirage is not best placed for general business. There is car parking, though not a huge amount. The Mirage is adjacent to the Ocean Club, and it is an obvious connection that as the Ocean Club went into terminal decline, the Mirage would struggle badly. Picanhas Brazilian grill opened just a mile or so east of Luz, and that appears to have killed off the Mirage.

Since Mr David Jones is prominent in the Netflix gossip and will probably pop up again, here is a photo of him (on the right).

For more bio, go to https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/415539/is-fireman-sam-your-pole-model/

Madeleine v Paços de Ferreira

Paços de Ferreira’s opening match in the Primeira Liga this year is away to Marítimo of Madeira.

http://www.dn.pt/desporto/interior/pacos-de-ferreira-vai-de-barco-para-a-madeira-8689787.html

My interest in this is simple. The news report says the team is making the trip by boat from Porto Santo, and the sea trip will last 2.5 hours. This is when things did not look right, surely no one could have taken Madeleine to Madeira by sea in so short a time.

The reason that the football team is using a ferry to get to Madeira is that Madeira’s airport, Cristiano Ronaldo, has been closed for some time, due to exceptionally strong winds over the island. As it happens, Cristiano Ronaldo has already re-opened, and some 8 aircraft have landed and 5 departed.

Back to Paços de Ferreira and Porto Santo. It turns out that Paços de Ferreira are located to the north-east of Porto, so the team is going to be doing a lot of travelling this season.

Here is a map of south-west Iberia, and out into the Atlantic.

Madeira is the island marked with Funchal. Porto Santo is the much smaller island above and to the right. The gap between that looks tiny is what is going to take 2.5 hours by boat. So it’s plain that a journey by sea from mainland Portugal to Madeira would take days.

Madeira happens to have two relevancies to the Madeleine McCann story, which is why this news item popped out at me. In an intelligence report around the year 2000, Madeira was noted as one of 4 paedophile hotspots in Portugal though, from memory, it was more to do with in-family activity and sex tourism. While the person other than Vitor dos Santos who handled bookings at the Ocean Club, Luis Duarte, was having a short break in Madeira when Madeleine disappeared.

Returning to Paços de Ferreira, their match v Marítimo kicks off at 4pm tomorrow, and they expect to depart Madeira at 8pm for the marathon trip home. Weather conditions will determine whether they fly direct to Porto from Cristiano Ronaldo or whether they transfer back to Porto Santo by boat.

ETA Marítimo 1  Paços de Ferreira 0.

Madeleine – Steve Gibson on YouTube

A Mr. Steve Gibson has uploaded a YouTube video that seemingly follows on from one of the men identified in the Panorama 10 year special.

It is at https://youtu.be/XBmxYzo6vyo and was uploaded on 9 July 2017. Before you spend over 51mins of your life on this, let me explain the provenance.

Mr Gibson uploaded a shorter video to YouTube on the Madeleine McCann case, about one year earlier than his current opus. That video was rambling, full of swearing, and Mr Gibson made clear he was new to the case at that time. It is self evident from that video that Mr Gibson was fairly ignorant of the case basics.

Reading up for a year is unlikely to have transformed Mr Gibson’s expertise, but at least in his July 2017 effort he desists from swearing.

His basic train of thought is as follows.

• Kate and Gerry McCann can be ruled out, largely on the response of the dogs.
• The Tapas 7 can be ruled out, largely on the basis that they had no need to get involved in a cover-up.
• Random individuals mentioned in the PJ Files, e.g. bogus charity collectors or alleged surveillance people, can be ruled out, largely on the basis that there was insufficient evidence of monitoring of apartment 5A.
• This leaves an inside job, conducted by a staff member at the Ocean Club, with access to keys.
• Cleaners can be ruled out, largely because Mr Gibson thinks they can.
• Maintenance workers can be ruled out, largely because Mr Gibson thinks they can.
• Staff such as restaurant workers, gardeners and drivers are ruled out, because Mr Gibson thinks it was done with a key to 5A.
• That leaves those in administration (Ocean Club 24 hour reception). Of which Mr Gibson thinks they number around a dozen.
• And for some reason, Mr Gibson then homes in on one of the Panorama people, Vitor dos Santos.

Perhaps it was the Panorama programme, perhaps not, but Mr Gibson has lifted both video and stills from that special to support his analysis. He has alleged that in the Panorama interview conducted by Richard Bilton, Sr dos Santos’ behaviour was strange, in that he mentioned several times that he had lost his job over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and that he expressed no emotional tie to Madeleine, or support for her parents.

He went further by overlaying on the Panorama footage the darker-skinned Smithman e-fit, thereby implying a likeness.

Mr Gibson went to considerable length to state he could not prove this theory, which is probably a wise decision.

I am not a fan of behavioural analysis. In Sr dos Santos’ position it strikes me as impossible to predict what ‘correct’ behaviour would be. And as for the Smithman e-fits, I am of the opinion these are junk quality, and tell us very little indeed.

There are things about Sr dos Santos as a suspect that are a poor fit. His statement shows that he was casado i.e. married, so exactly what he was going to do with a 3-year old girl is difficult to imagine. His economic situation seems to have deteriorated with his change of occupation. And 10 years on from Madeleine’s disappearance, he appears to be living and working close to Luz, in plain and common view.

Luz – Panorama 3 May 2017

The BBC did a 10^th anniversary special Panorama on 3 May 2017, regarding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. In it, towards the end, they featured an interview with Senhor Vitor dos Santos. He had a senior job at the Ocean Club in 2007, had been working there for some 18 years, and the following year, he was made redundant, with a letter claiming this was due to the Madeleine fallout.

Senhor dos Santos then became a small-boat captain, taking tourists for a trip around a natural sea-wonder a few kilometres south of Lagos.

The stash of photos I found recently contains dozens and dozens of old Lagos. I find them interesting to flip though, because I can match many of them up to the modern day Lagos that I know. However, I don’t wish to get into documenting the history of Lagos.

So the following photo is only presented because it matches up with the Panorama interview of the intrepid boat-captain. This photo is simply dated as the 1940s.

Make up your own mind about what is going on here.

Personally, I am not seeing a tourist trip, with a boat captain making a living from this. I am seeing a family day out, a working group having a bit of fun time.

From the shadows, it looks like the sun is at its peak in midsummer.

The lens flare through the centre of the photo is entirely original. And I have no idea how this photo was posed.

Luz at the beginning of the 20th century #2

Here are more photos of Luz supposedly from the early 20^th century. I cannot discern anything in them to confirm this date, but I have no reason to assume the date is inaccurate.

Although early 20^th century appears to have little to do with Madeleine McCann, it does put into context how Luz evolved up to the time that the Ocean Club was built. That in turn impacts the fact that the Ocean Club is not a private complex. Rather, it is completely interwoven with public roads and areas. That in turn means that it is impossible for the Ocean Club to have CCTV, with the exception of a few internal areas.

If these photos are really from around the 1900s, there is an implication. Today, Luz regularly gets an influx of visitors from Lisbon and Oporto. I was having a sea-front discussion on 2 May 2017, and the café had a large contingent of Portuguese customers, in groupings which looked like tourists rather than locals. But Lisbon is 3 hours away in a modern car on a modern motorway. How long did it take in horse-drawn transport or early cars?

Have a look at this photo.

These are the rocks to the south of the Fortaleza, and the view is east towards Rocha Negra. The ladies appear to be dressed in their Sunday finest. The photo is as posed as posed can be. It looks as if someone may have hand-tinted the photo to add some red effects to the clouds, but that could have other explanations, such as originating with the scanning process.

I have no expertise whatsoever in Portuguese historical clothing, so I cannot use it as a clue.

However, the length of time today for the trip from Lisbon suggest this group is not from there, but much closer. I have already posted photos of early Luz, which show some large buildings on 25^th April Street, so a possibility is wealthy citizens of Luz, perhaps after a Sunday visit to Nossa Senhora da Luz.

Gonçalo Amaral raises an alternative possibility in his book A Verdade da Mentira. He suggests that Luz had a certain popularity with the citizens of Lagos, and in the early 20^th century, that journey would not have been hard either by horse and carriage or by early motor transport.

Here is another photograph, this time taken near the small beach, to the west of the main beach.

The clothes appear to me to be slightly less up-market, though I would still describe them as posh. This is less posed, but the thing that is interesting is that everyone is on the rocks. No-one is actually on the little beach.

The 1492 in the bottom has no real significance. The Fortaleza was built much later. I have yet to find out what Vivenda Mascarenhas means.

This last photo simply gives a pictorial idea of the scale of fishing in Luz a century or so ago.

The legend says ‘fishermen washing the nets on the beach.’ Presumably, the catch has been taken into Luz to be processed, and the nets need to be cleaned of fish remains before storing them.

It looks like 8 sailing ships to me, each much larger than a row-boat, and each powered by sail. There are 13 fishermen involved in this washing of the nets. I don’t know whether this is the only net used, or whether each boat came near the beach in turn and the collective then helped to wash that particular net.

From the size of the mesh, it looks like they were fishing for very large fish, such as tuna.

The fishing industry in Luz would slowly decline, and cross over with the tourist industry when it began to take off.