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

Would you buy one?

[BarneyL]

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

Helicopter or Hovercraft?

[maroberts]

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....

Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual

[eldavojohn]

Although some government officials got very excited when they saw him conduct a demonstration flight in neighbouring Katsina state, Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has so far shown no interest in his aircraft.

"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.

Would be interesting to see how it "flies"

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

From the picture I am not able to make out how he did the most crucial thing for the helicopter, controlling of the collective pitch (sometimes called total pitch) and the cyclic pitch. Without it, the craft will lift off and "fly" uncontrollably and land. I see two large struts holding up the rotor hub and the hub seems to be a ball. He might have done away with total pitch, relying on throttle ( input power) to self adjust the "lift" and the ball being pivoted to provide just the cyclic pitch control. That will give some rudimentary direction control. Interesting toy. Hope a youtube video appears soon.

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.

No pitch control

[goombah99]

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.

DEAR SIR

[Arthur B.]

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)

BS

[ddrichardson]

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.

Sikorsky

[goodmanj]

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.

With what money?

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Ay AY yay caramba!

[torkus]

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.

I'm not sure that ligher weight has anything to do with safety though. I can take my 385 pound motorcycle and hit a cement wall at 150MPH after all. I can take a 12HP scooter and hit the same wall at 60-70MPH too.

Generally you weaken a structure when reducing weight. I'd immagine this helicopter is probaby more sturdy than the Flyer I.

Keep in mind you can learn more about planes, trains and automobiles (and helicopters) in a 15 minute internet search than the entire world knew in 1903. I bet the second-hand civic engine is more reliable than the flyer I's one-off custom hand built (in a mere 6 weeks) engine.

Kudos to the kid. He's done what the vast majority of /.ers haven't and probably couldn't. Yes, I'd be hesitant to go for a ride but really. If a kid in Nigeria can build a working helicopter it shows how pathetic the rest of the world has become. I'm still stuck riding a train to work every day that's late one out of 15 trips on average.