Home-made Helicopters in Nigeria 319
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."
Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No pitch control (Score:5, Informative)
BS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Good effort, lots of kits for homebuilding (Score:1, Informative)
I was just recently at "Rotorfest" at the helicopter museum in Pennsylvania. There were a few small homemade helicopters on display. There are also more small home-built kiy helicopters available than I realized. An Air Command kit, Benson Sport kit, the Robinson, the Rotorway Scorpion kit...
Some nice kits, as well as the big well-known helicopters, shown here:
http://www.helicoptermuseum.org/Aircraft.asp [helicoptermuseum.org]
Re:Whoever measured the 'copter... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hummm.. (Score:3, Informative)
Chris Mattern
Gazelle != good example (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:2, Informative)
Read the full story (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Informative)
A real GEM (Score:3, Informative)
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 [rotorway.com] days.)
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Informative)
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 [eaa1267.org].)
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:4, Informative)
Helicopters don't fly in a vacuum.
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:3, Informative)
I am sure flying at 7 feet altitude in this thing is the biggest thrill anyone in a 100-mile radius can get, so Huzzah! Huzzah! for him.
A liquid cooled engine is a poor choice for a light aircraft. There have been attempts to use off the shelf automotive engines in aircraft, but they are just too heavy.
Re:heh. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:3, Informative)
Helicopters don't fly in a vacuum.
A more massive helicopter won't necessarily have a smaller "frontal area" with respect to atmospheric freefall than a Wright Flyer would, unless the rotors fold and the Flyer's wings don't.
The only areas in which the relative weight of the contraptions matter would be (A) likelihood of lift surface failure (a heavier airframe might make rotor or wing failure more likely), and (B) impact energy given equivalent freefall impact speed. And the latter only matters for whatever the aircraft is falling onto; for occupants, the part that matters is their own mass and impact speed (in the classic kinetic energy relation).
Re:Helicopter or Hovercraft? (Score:3, Informative)
When a wing approaches the ground, the air that it is pushing on bounces back at it (not technically correct, but the analogy is close enough to envision the effect). Ground effect becomes pronounced at about 1 wingspan's distance from the ground. He could be planning on a 15ft rotor.
Stanley Hiller did it.. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.hiller.org/in_memory.shtml/ [hiller.org]
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.