Home-made Helicopters in Nigeria

W33dz writes "A 24-year-old undergraduate from Nigeria is building helicopters out of old car and bike parts. Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi, a physics student, spent eight months building the yellow model seen on yahoo or on Gizmodo using the money he makes from repairing cell phones and computers. While some of the parts have been sourced from a crashed 747, the chopper contains all sorts of surprises."

Comments

Re:Ay AY yay caramba!

[Orange Crush]

You're right. Their plane didn't weigh half a ton and have a 133HP engine. It weigned a bit over 600 pounds and had a whopping 12HP.

It also had wings. If the engine died, it still might be possible to land softly enough to not get squished. That helicopter will fall right out of the sky or go twirling/tumbling/spiraling out of control and impact the ground/innocent bystanders/flammable buildings/etc. if the engine stalls, a fuel line clogs, the transmission breaks, a rotor snaps off, etc.

Kudos to this guy for building his own helicopter from found items, but he's going to crash and kill himself and maybe others. If he wants to build helicopters for the government, he should put some of his effort into getting out of Nigeria and getting a job in aerospace. (He's just gotten a lot of free publicity, should be much easier to get someone's attention now).

Attilla, you've always been an ass

[Tibor the Hun]

The guy plainly said that it falls from the sky.
Galileo wasn't in the sky when he tested his theory. He was just like on a tower or something.