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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."
Certain absolutely mandatory items, like X-ray and ultrasonic parts inspections, are not practical for the home builder and are likely to lead to a very short trip.
It may hover in ground effect but I doubt that it can fly out side of it. 133 HP is way under powered for a four seat helicopter. It is a wonderful attempt but I hope he doesn't kill himself. He has talent that is for sure.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Personally if I received an e-mail from Nigeria offering me a cheap helicopter I doubt I'd trust it.
I think I'll keep saving for my skycar
it will be able to fly at an altitude of 15 feet for three hours at a stretch...
or until it encounters a tree, telegraph pole, house, giraffe....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"No one from the NCAA has come to see what I've done. We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented. And here you see the plight of Nigeria and many other countries, they will save money in the short run by buying from a country that already has the infrastructure and expertise to build commodities but they will never take the steps to set that up in their own country. This destroys any chance of the people ever building a stable economy & providing employment for its citizens.
Nigeria would pay a premium to start up a helicopter plant or to start R&D but since the resources are not readily available and there's already another country selling the choppers, this man will most likely partake in the brain drain and go somewhere where his knowledge and resourcefulness are recognized and rewarded.
The government should either change its ways or just deal with being known only for e-mail scams and human suffering from inept governance. That's the problem with inept governance though, it usually persists by definition.
My work here is dung.
Sure I am glad there is atleast one Nigerian working with his hands and brain instead of sening emails about 18 million dollars in a slush fund left over from the coffers of General Abacha.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Looking at the photo it looks like the blade pitch is fixed and the braces look like the hold the shaft at a fixed angle. It is thus hard to figure out how it gets any forward motion, or how he would compensate for a tilt in the aircraft. Not sure how this works.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
..provided you name me as your sole heir....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
GOOD DAY TO YOU AND GOD BLESS. I HAVE BEEN MANUFACTURING HELICOPTERS FROM USED CAR SINCE 10 YEARS (AS SEEN ON YAHOO) AND RECENTLY SOLD MY FLEET FOR THE SUM OF $100,000,000. UNFORTUNATELY, THE PAYMENT OF THIS MONEY IS STILL SITTING IN ESCROW IN A NIGERIAN BANK AS THE STATE AIRFORCE WHO BOUGHT THE HELICOPTERS REFUSE TO PAY. I NEED YOUR HELP TO UNLOCK THAT SUM FROM THE ESCROW, FOR THIS SERVICE YOU WILL BE PAID A FULL 5%, THAT IS $5,000,000. IF YOU CAN HELP ME PLEASE FAX ME YOUR PASSPORT.
(hey it's caps-lock day today anyway)
\u262D = \u5350
Seriously, I don't care how crude or rudimentary it is, build a helicopter that actually flies, wow. With proper tools, and funding, he could go on to make some great innovations, unfortunately, like he said, his government doesn't recognize achievements, and he'll likely end up going elsewhere.
Gibble: Descriptive of an emotional state in which one's mind is scrabbling for some purchase on reality
I would love to see more photos of this but suspect we wont. His description of the controls doesn't really fit with how rotary wing aircraft operate and there are other reservations.
133 horsepower is very underpowered considering the smallest I work with is the Gazelle with 858shp and the quoted 300 rpm on blades that size is very low to give any kind of lift, in fact it is ridiculous. Car engines are relatively heavy and looking at the welded head and the car seats, I cannot imagine this has the capability to lift off with a person on board.
Looking at the photo, it also appears not to have a swash plate or similar mechanism, so how the rotor disc is positioned to give directional flight I have no idea. On the plus side he does have a big red navigation light on top. Never mind that it's not on the port side as it's supposed to be.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
I dunno, its home made, Heath Robinson, scrapheap challenge and scary as hell ...
... but strangely a lot more plausible then Air Wolf and Blue Thunder.
(I'm informed by a pilot colleague that without squash plates and cyclic controls - whatever the hell they are - its not a true helicopter and hence is uncontrollable. Still we all agreed it was better then we could do.)
More power to this guy. Any info on its mpg? Safety is a bit of an issue, but that's if he runs into something in front of him - not much will happen by falling from a 7-15 foot height.
Something like that would actually be handy for travelling in many parts of the world where the roads are poor and access is difficult - cheap helicopters would be great for getting around and getting access.
Imagine using these in the aftermath of natural disasters when the roads are washed out and areas are inaccessible in places like the Honduras or New Orleans. In America, we can't/don't build cheap aircraft like this. Heck, an auto mechanic could probably do most of the maintenance on the thing...
You really don't need any instruments to fly in clear weather. I think the only "required" instruments for VFR flight are an altimeter and airspeed indicator. Lots of hang gliders don't even have those.
In a helicopter seven feet is enough to kill you. Heck you can kill yourself on the ground with just a little bad luck. All it would take is for the transmission to let go and have a 133 HP chain whip through the cabin. Helicopters are complex beasts.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"I watched action movies a lot and I was fascinated by the way choppers fly. I decided it would be easier to build one than to build a car,"
It's easier to crash one too.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This is pretty amazing. The technical aspects of how flawed this helicopter is does not really go with the intent of the article. He obviously wanted a challenge, as I can imagine that being a physics student in Nigeria can't be too fulfilling, and building a helicopter and succeeding is a great accomplishment. Just reading what parts he used shows that he made something from nothing.
The Robinson R22has only 160HP and is a real helicopter in widespread use as a trainer.
Obviously you don't need over 800hp to get a helicopter to work. Granted, I'm sure his aircraft weighs a great deal more than an R22.
Yeah, the fall is only 1D6 damage, but the couple of tons of steel and burning fuel falling on top of you shortly after could be probably modeled like this:
Crashing Home-made Helicopter: CR 10; mechanical; location trigger; no reset; Atk +16 melee (8D6+8, bludgeoning); burning fuel (equivalent to an incendiary cloud spell, 15th-level wizard, 4D6/round for 15 rounds, DC 22 Reflex save half damage); Search DC 20; Disable Device DC 25. Market Price: unknown (unique).
No sig for the moment.
"Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi" is Nigeriasn for "MacGyver"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I suggest everyone read up on Igor Sikorskiy, the inventor (more or less) of the helicopter.
"You can't make a helicopter without ultrasonic and x-ray fracture inspection."
Well sure that makes it safer, but Sikorskiy didn't have any of that. Hell, I don't think they did that in the Vietnam era.
"You need 900 horsepower (or some damn thing) to make a working heli."
Sikorskiy's first helicopter ran on a 90-hp piston engine, with a welded steel frame.
It's true that this guy's helicopter is probably overweight, flying on ground-effect only, and it seems to be missing the most important (and complicated) part, the swashplate / cyclic blade control. But give him the resources Sikorkiy had, and I think he could do it.
The problem with "inept" government in the third world usually goes somewhat like this: to build anything, you need money. Loans and foreign aid are available, of course, only they come tied to one or both of:
1. you _must_ use that money to buy from the country that gave you the money. Often they'll even tell you what, and from exactly what company.
For example, let's say Nigeria wants to build a dam. (Or anything else, including helicopters.) The sane way would be to pay some local construction company to build it. After all, they work cheaper, you inject some money in the local economy, and might even stimulate some specialists to stay in your county instead of skipping over the border at the first oportunity. But you won't get a loan, much less foreign aid, for that. Unless you can prove that you're so solvable that you didn't even need a loan at all, except for some uncontrollable desire to pay interest.
The loans you can get come with strings attached like "but you'll contract the building from this American corporation." Sometimes you don't even actually see the money. They're transferred from an USA bank account to another USA bank account, and that's that. Of course, it only costs a few times more than letting the locals do it, and helps ruin yet another local industry, but such is being on the shit end of the imperialism stick.
And if you think that dam building is something you can do without, picture the same deal on grain, trucks, and other such. Essentially there's a _shitload_ of loans and foreign aid that isn't what you think it is. It's tied to destroying your local agriculture and industry.
2. you _must_ implement some good ol' right-wing reforms. Cut government spending, let companies go bankrupt, cut down social security, raise interest rates, etc.
Sounds like good, common sense advice, right?
Well, the problem with common sense is that it isn't that common and often makes no sense. In this case, according to modern Keynesian economics, those are the exact measures that will transform a recession into a depression, or a depression into a crash. That's stuff you do in an economic boom, not during times of crisis. It's counter-intuitive, but modern economics tend to be that way.
Essentially we, the West, have been asking the third world countries to destroy their own economy, ever since WW2. Welcome to the wonderful world of imperialism. They're supposed to be busy sewing cheap sports shoes and mining cheap iron for us, not to start industrializing.
And as a third world government, you'll be nailed to a cross whether you take it or not. Your choices there are (A) refuse and get to explain to a whole country why they'll have less bread or more brownouts this year, and that in the long term it's better for them, or (B) take it even if you know that in the long term you're only harming your country. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and someone will blame you for either choice.
Oh, and if you chose A, congrats, now you've got all the first world treating you like the great Satan too, for refusing to play their game. Some economic sanctions might be in your future, to destroy you that way. On the other hand, choice B at least makes you look good in the short term and often comes together with some bribe.
It's easy to blame it on inept governments or kleptokracy, but that's really the only choices they typically have there. It's a lose-lose choice. But option B at least doesn't cause massive unrest and a bunch of other problems.
It's easy to look at it and say that they took choice B only because they're fucking stupid or because of the bribe. And I guess it some cases it even is so. But in a lot of cases I genuinely wonder if it's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This helicopter, which HASN'T crashed, is made out of the bits of a plane that did. A Boeing 747, that is made with all that modern tech and those high safety standards.
So tell me again, what is riskier? Remember, that quality western aircraft consist entirely of parts made by the lowest bidder, checked by a company under constant pressure to cut costs, and operated by an airline desperate to squeeze every last mile out of a decades old machine.
Odd thing is that an amateur will often take more care then a proffesional, after all, it ain't the pro who actually got to fly his own deathtrap. Just check aviation history how many real aircraft accidents are down to design flaws. Including choppers whose blades explode if hit by lightening, denied for years by the helicopter industry of being possible.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
hate on this website is appalling. Yes the kid does have unrealistic expectations if he thinks the government will buy his helicopter. But, is it not impressive that he was able to fashion a working helicopter out of existing materials? And he is not an aeronautical engineer, he's just an undergrad college student, with (apparently) very limited resources and alot of motivation. For that, all he receives here are lame jokes about crashing into elephants and other stupid 3rd world Africa jokes and several people saying they wouldnt fly in it. I wouldnt fly in Orville and Wilbur's plane either. And who cares?
As in "Ground Effect Machine". At a seven foot altitude, this thing is well within its own ground effect. In other words, it's a hovercraft that looks like a helicopter.
Mind, I'll give the guy props for effort and ingenuity, and if he gets the 15 foot altitude version working that would be kind of fun to skim around in over open enough terrain. But an actual helicopter that can fly out of ground effect is a bit more of a challenge. (Me, I've lusted after Rotorway's homebuilt kits since their original Scorpion days.)
-- Alastair
The minimum required instrument list differs a little between different airplanes (the manufacturer decides.)
Here's what the FAA requires:
A - Airspeed indicator.
B - Altimeter.
C - Magnetic direction indicator. (read: compass.)
D - Tachometer.
E - Oil pressure gauge.
F - Oil temperature gauge for each air-cooled engine.
G - Fuel gauge indicating the quantity of fuel in each tank.
H - For small civil airplanes certificated after 1996, an approved aviation red or aviation white anticollision light system.
I - An approved safety belt with an approved metal-to-metal latching device for each occupant 2 years of age or older.
J - For small civil airplanes manufactured after 1978, an approved shoulder harness for each front seat. (other req'mts R.S. 1986)
K - An emergency locator transmitter, (excepts - sing. place ++)
Now, if you're flying an ultralight -- under 250 pounds -- you can do any fool thing you want, but in the US, if you have an airplane with an airworthiness certificate, you have to take along some stuff.
(The above list from an Experimental Aviation website quiz.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
According to the article — which we all read, did not we — the contraption is built in part from the pieces of a 747, which crashed nearby some years ago.
This points at two things at once
That said, I'm afraid, the regulations/inspections you consider "essential" are not really such — I sense the "sour grapes" sentiment. Sure, it is far riskier to fly in this guy's machine than in a factory-built helicopter. But the fact, that it flies at all — and that he is still a student, who works on the copter in between studying and repairing other people's electronics to supplement his income — are rather remarkable. If a 24-year old in the dirt-poor Nigeria can do this, where is my flying car in the US?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Request for urgent business relationship
First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. I am sure and have confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of this great magnitude involving a pending transaction requiring maximum confidence.
I am a physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria who is interested in production of helicopters with funds which are presently trapped in Nigeria. In order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us to transfer into your account the said trapped funds.
The source of this fund is as follows; during the last military regime here in Nigeria, the government officials set up aircraft companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. The present civilian government set up a contract review panel and we have identified a lot of inflated military contract funds which are presently floating in the central bank of Nigeria ready for payment.
However, by virtue of my position as a physics undergraduate, I cannot acquire this money in my name. I have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the university to look for an overseas partner into whose account we would transfer the sum of US$21,320,000.00 (twenty one million, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars). Hence we are writing you this letter. We have agreed to share the money thus; 1. 20% for the account owner 2. 70% for us (the students) 3. 10% to be used in settling taxation and all local and foreign expenses. It is from the 70% that we wish to commence the helicopter manufacturing business.
Please, note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following information by telephone/fax; 234-1-7740449, your signed and stamped letterhead paper. The above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. This way we will use your name to apply for payment and re-award the contract in your name.
We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction. Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above telephone/fax numbers. I will send you detailed information of this pending project when I have heard from you.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Well, it's kinda f. The fact is, all first world governments nowadays are essentially Keynesian. There have been some minor refinements of it, but essentially no big change to the core of it. The whole USA, EU _and_ Commonwealth (the UK one, not the ex-USSR) still _are_ keynesian, and the majority of economists still are keynesian. By what kind of reckoning, then, is it not modern any more?
There are fringe groups (e.g., the Libertarians, since you've linked to that site) which think that Keynes is wrong or outdated, that much is clear. But it will become "not modern" when, you know, at least one major first-world economy runs on something better. A theory only supercedes the old one when it's been tried and tested, not when one fringe group starts screaming that they know better. The way I see it, the Libertarians don't as much have "theories" now, they just have an untested "hypothesis". They think they know better how the economy should be run, but we don't really have any proof that things actually work that way.
In fact, if we're talking Libertarians, most signs point at "we've already been there, and it didn't work too well." Which places even more burden of proof on the ones claiming to know better. If I jumped off the house once and broke my leg, someone damn better have a very convincing proof that jumping off the house is good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying their view is necessarily wrong. Who knows, they could even be right. Just that it's untested, and _didn't_ replace Keynesian economics yet.
As for that site and analysis of the Great Depression... well, I didn't have the time for an in-depth study of that particular text yet, but let's just say, as a superficial impression and gut feeling that:
1. Well, I might even take that site seriously, if it wasn't an overt libertarian propaganda site. The emphasis not being even as much on "libertarian" as on "propaganda". You only need to click on their "about" link to basically be told, in so many words, that it's all about propaganda. It speaks over and over again about being born out of a vision that they don't just need ideas, they need to disseminate them.
And somehow I don't expect a balanced view of the world from a site which is (A) overtly aligned with one point of view as their holy truth, and (B) overtly dedicated to bringing the Word to the masses. It's akin to asking for an unbiased academic discussion of the world's religions on Vatican's site.
2. Suspiciously enough, it also runs contrary the more mainstream analyses of the Great Depression which, funnily enough, are the exact opposite.
The fact is, the USA government didn't even have the means to do that at the time. It also omits the fact that it was just the latest and biggest of a whole cycle of booms-and-depressions that plagued the whole 19'th century and early 20'th century, most of which happened in decisively laissez faire times. (I.e., practically libertarian times.) And which cycles are not only documented everywhere, but even Marx's prediction of a self-destruction of capitalism was based on them. It was _that_ predictable where it's headed. It also seems to blatantly omit the fact that countries where the government _did_ massively spend (e.g., the USA with its New Deal, Germany with its rearmament, etc) got out of the depression the fastest, while those who stuck to lean government ideas (e.g., Canada) were stuck with a depression until the 40's, when they finally got dragged into WW2. Etc.
Briefly, it just seems to be a bit too unbelievable a whole to swallow.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.hiller.org/in_memory.shtml/ Stanley finished high school despite the many extracurricular activities in his life, entering the University of California at Berkeley at age 16. His college phase lasted but a year: he was consumed with the history and technology of vertical flight, intensifying his designing of a co-axial with the aid of a draftsman, a welder and a part-time auto mechanic. Although many materials were frozen by the War Production Board, he managed to improvise a 100-pound model. Discouraged by Army officials, the 17-year-old inventor lugged his aircraft and drawings to Washington DC, where higher authorities not only permitted his proposed XH-44 helicopter to be finished, but granted Stanley a deferment from the draft board.
Although UC Berkeley had little chance to influence young Stanley because he dropped out to build his business at the end of his freshman year, the university did yield the love of his life, Carolyn Balsdon, whom he married when they were both 22.
By 1944, Stanley Hiller, Jr., completed the first successful flight of a helicopter in the western United States. He flew his yellow fabric-covered contraption himself, although he had never flown a helicopter nor seen one fly. After at least one mishap, in August of that year a successful demonstration was made at San Francisco's Marina Green, where a plaque today commemorates the historic event. The flight propelled the young inventor-who had no engineering degrees and, in fact, never finished college-into international headlines. He became the youngest person ever to receive the coveted Fawcett Aviation Award for major contributions to the advancement of aviation. Eventually, the little co-axial XH-44 "Hiller-Copter" would earn a permanent place in Smithsonian Institution.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"