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."
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
hummm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:5, Insightful)
"No one from the NCAA has come to see what I've done. We don't reward talent in this country," he lamented.
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.
Good for him. (Score:3, Insightful)
Neat... (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:5, Insightful)
After he goes to college then maybe building helicopters in country could be an option.
Or crop dusters?
Or UAVs?
Or maybe even just a shop to do helicopter maintenance in country?
The man seems to have lots of raw talent. Now he needs education and opportunity.
Well done! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:0, Insightful)
You kids today are pussies. You think the Wright brothers had X-rays or modern safety equipment? You have to die from something, it might as well be the same way you lived - as a nerd.
"The brave may die, but the coward never lives."
Fuck you.
-mcgrew [kuro5hin.org]
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, think of your building your own helicopter vs. buying one from somebody in the business. For simplicity's sake, let's say that if you pay yourself a reasonable amount for your time, the cost comes out even. In your homemade helicopter, you have a death risk of 1% per thousand hours of flight. In a "real" helicopter, let's say your risk was 0.001% per thousand hours.
If you go ahead and build your home helicopter, you have just spent 0.999%/hr of "opportunity risk" for the thrill of flying in your own invention.
I can't tell you whether that's a good "investment" or not. Maybe the thrill means a lot more to you than it does to me. Maybe you were on the fence about committing suicide, so the risk doesn't really mean much other than an end to unbearable indecision. It's up to you to make the calculation. I can say this though: if the thrill of flying your own invention has no value to you, you're a fool to try it.
On the other hand, the marginal risk calculation may be utterly meaningless to this guy. If having access to his own helicopter is for practical purposes an impossible dream, it makes no sense to upbraid him for not choosing that instead. His calculation is only based on having his own aircraft versus not having his own aircraft.
Even if it weren't, the project may have utility for him that we can't even imagine. Maybe he'll be the Igor Sikorsky of Africa. Goodness knows small scale aviation innovation is glacially slow in the US because of safety concerns. The cost of Africa developing indigenous technology would seem appalling, but it's up to them to determine if it is worth it.
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:3, Insightful)
The Nigerian government should buy the products with the highest value. This will help their neighbors, which will help them. The Nigerian people should do what they do best and what they don't do good, they should import. Pretending there is no world market will kill you.
There is one good thing about this chopper, though. It proves the value of scrap metal. Scrap metal is in my opinion the best way for the poorest countries without valuable natural resources to become rich. Buy scrap metal, recycle and sell steel. Of course, most of them already do this, and not all can get rich, its a matter of competition, but this is one of the more important third world industries.
So Nigeria, export steel and buy the best helicopters you can find. Tell this loon to figure out a more effective way of making steel instead.
Re: D&D Trap worthy of Tomb of Horrors (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't recall the Wright Brothers' first plane weighing half a ton, and being powered by a 133HP engine...
Experimenting with powerful engines, allowing for heavy construction, means that any small mistake is going to be much, much more disasterous than it would have been in the old days.
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:3, Insightful)
Nigeria should produce whatever it has a comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] in and trade for the rest, just like the rest of the world does. Attempting to do a little bit of everything would only stunt its economic growth.
Re:Helicopter or Hovercraft? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to know how he arrived at 15' as a service ceiling. How would the aircraft know the difference between 15' on one day and 30' on day with higher air pressure?
I expect that he chose the figure for safety reasons. Perhaps the design cannot autorotate; or maybe it cannot achieve a safe and stable descent. I doubt it is because the helicopter rides on a cushion of air like a hovercraft. If anything, I think it's own turbulence would present a problem for it.
Sikorsky (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Neat... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cheap and small is all well and good, but when you want complex tech to be reliable, the "cheap" goes away real quick. Especially when you're trusting lives to that tech.
With what money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did the Japanese start building American-style cars when GM and Chrysler were already good at making them?
Not to mention that the Nigerian government certainly have their own helicopters, regardless of how poor the country is in general. Can the government stand to save money by developing state-manufactured choppers? Or better yet, can it save money by cutting off their reliance on foreign maintenance crews, and instead training their own?
Nobody says they have to tackle Sikorsky on the global market, but I'm betting many developing nations would be in for some cheap, fairly reliable helicopters.
The problem here isn't that the government is inept - they know full well what they're doing. It's just that supporting local industries doesn't improve their lavish lifestyle in any appreciable way - improving the lives of their governed peoples is the LAST thing on their agenda, right beneath "decide what color of Italian leather to put in my new Ferrari". The problem with these "developing" countries is that none are truly developing, they suffer from poor management.
The sheer amount of... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sour grapes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Unusable Prototype But a Promising Individual (Score:3, Insightful)
He's already got an advanced degree; how much more education does he need? He's used that education and now has something to sell - it's infinitely better than the 'nobody wants to give me a free handout' attitude. Sure, he's grumpy about his lack of instant success in marketing said product but that's typical of engineers. I hope he manages to team up with someone with local business savvy who won't screw him over.
Re:With what money? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's very insightful indeed, but then at least let's stop sneering at them because they're poor.
Poverty is, basically, a vicious circle. You don't get a loan because you're poor, and you can't get out of poverty without some money to industrialize with.
Saying that some third world country is inept for not building a helicopter factory, is kinda silly.
It's like saying that a homeless should just take a loan and open a supermarket. That's a non-functional plan to get out of poverty. He can't get that kind of a loan because he's poor in the first place. (And, yes, I can understand why the banks don't want to risk that money.)
Except that a homeless in the USA or EU could still (at least theoretically) get a job at a car wash and use that income, no matter how meager, to slowly crawl his way up. Third world nations without much natural resources (mainly read: oil) can't even do that. The only way up is to invest in industrializing, and they don't have the money to do that. And if anyone offers them some money, it's tied to the condition that it helps destroy the little industry they already had.
Briefly: I'm not asking anyone to risk their retirement savings to help Nigeria, or any other poor country. But I _am_, basically, saying, "let's not be so snotty, shall we?" The snotty attitude that they must be poor only because they're inept, is... rarely that simple. I'd say it reeks of the medieval elitism that the peasants must be poor only because they're stupid and lazy, except it doesn't just reek of it, it _is_ the same elitism in a more enlightened disguise.
Re:Ay AY yay caramba! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The sheer amount of... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, yes, clueless libertarian propaganda FTW (Score:3, Insightful)
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.