A 24-year-old undergraduate physics student in Nigeria is building a helicopter out of old car and bike parts!
Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi, a physics student, spent eight months building the yellow model seen here, using the money he makes from repairing cellphones and computers. While some of the parts have been sourced from a crashed 747, the chopper contains all sorts of surprises.
The 12-meter-long aircraft, which has never flown above a height of seven feet, is powered by a secondhand 133 horsepower engine from a Honda Civic. In the basic cockpit there are two Toyota car seats, with a couple more in the cabin behind. Controls are simple, with an ignition button, an accelerator lever to control vertical thrust and a joystick that provides balance and bearing. A camera beneath the chopper connected to a small screen on the dash gives the pilot ground vision, and he communicates via a small transmitter.
Plus, the materials he used (car seats, etc...) are quite heavy and with only 133 hp I seriously doubt this would get off the ground.
As an example, a Robinson R44 helicopter (also a four seater) uses a 245 hp engine. Also, if you look closely at the gimbal (the area where the rotors are attached to essentially the vertical shaft) there's a lot of stuff missing such as the parts that change the pitch of the rotors.
Plus, I don't know what he would have used from the old car and crashed 747 to build those specific parts.
Creating something from junk parts is all well and good (I go to Burning Man every year) and sure, he can even call it a helicopter. But the reality is that this thing doesn't fly like a helicopter. Show me a picture or even better, a video of this thing actually flying and I'll gladly eat crow.