PHOTO: Nigerian Undergraduate Student Builds a Working Helicopter from Scrap

A 24 year old Nigerian student has been making working helicopters from old cars and motorbike parts.

Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi a Physics undergraduate student makes money from repairing computers and mobile phones. The money he gets from this is channeled to making the helicopters.

The above yellow model took him eight months to build. Some parts of the model were taken from a crashed plane.

The chopper is 12 metres long. The highest it has flown is a height of 7 feet. It is powered by a secondhand Honda Civic 133 horsepower engine.

There are two Toyota car seats in the basic cockpit. Two more are at the back in the cabin. 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.

Mubarak decided it was easier to build a chopper than a car. He therefore searched on the internet for information on how to fly a chopper.

The student claims flying the aircraft he has built is not hard.

“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,” he explains. “The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rpm you press the joystick and it takes off.”

Presently, Mubarak is working on a new machine which he says “will be a radical improvement on the first one in terms of sophistication and aesthetics.” He says the new machine will have the ability to fly at 15 feet for a consecutive three hours.