If there’s a will, there’s a way! Where there are scraps, there could be choppers! Yeah right! Who would think that a man could manufacture a chopper right at his backyard? It may sound ridiculous. However, it is a product of ingenuity, and hard work.
Hard work makes many impossible things possible. If you are a dreamer, there is a higher possibility that you will achieve great things.
Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts. A second-hand 133 horsepower Honda Civic car engine powers it, with seats from an old Toyota saloon car. Its other parts come from the carcass of a Boeing 747, which crashed near Kano some years ago. For a four-seater, it is a big aircraft, measuring twelve meters (39 feet) long, seven meters high by five wide, although, his chopper has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet. The cockpit consists of a push-button ignition, an accelerator lever between the seats, which controls vertical thrust, a joystick that provides balance and bearing. A small screen on the dashboard connects to a camera underneath the helicopter for ground vision; a set of six buttons adjusts the screen's brightness and uses a small transmitter for communication.
"You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rpm you press the joystick and it takes off," Abdullahi explained from the cockpit. His motivation is even worth noting- "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," he said pacing the premises of the security division of the university, which he uses as hanger for his helicopter.
Unfortunately, although some government officials got very excited when they saw him conduct a demonstration flight in neighboring Katsina state, Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) had not shown 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.
He vowed to build a better one that could fly 15 feet for three hours at a stretch. A brand new motor would power it –an Albeit Taiwan-manufactured and destined for the Jincheng motorbike so common in the streets of Kano.
Note: I have gathered information from an article written by Aminu Abubakar from AFP Kano Nigeria.
Hard work makes many impossible things possible. If you are a dreamer, there is a higher possibility that you will achieve great things.
Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts. A second-hand 133 horsepower Honda Civic car engine powers it, with seats from an old Toyota saloon car. Its other parts come from the carcass of a Boeing 747, which crashed near Kano some years ago. For a four-seater, it is a big aircraft, measuring twelve meters (39 feet) long, seven meters high by five wide, although, his chopper has never attained an altitude of more than seven feet. The cockpit consists of a push-button ignition, an accelerator lever between the seats, which controls vertical thrust, a joystick that provides balance and bearing. A small screen on the dashboard connects to a camera underneath the helicopter for ground vision; a set of six buttons adjusts the screen's brightness and uses a small transmitter for communication.
"You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rpm you press the joystick and it takes off," Abdullahi explained from the cockpit. His motivation is even worth noting- "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," he said pacing the premises of the security division of the university, which he uses as hanger for his helicopter.
Unfortunately, although some government officials got very excited when they saw him conduct a demonstration flight in neighboring Katsina state, Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) had not shown 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.
He vowed to build a better one that could fly 15 feet for three hours at a stretch. A brand new motor would power it –an Albeit Taiwan-manufactured and destined for the Jincheng motorbike so common in the streets of Kano.
Note: I have gathered information from an article written by Aminu Abubakar from AFP Kano Nigeria.
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