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#1
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
Ricky wrote:
On Jan 14, 7:19 pm, William Hung wrote: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/homemade-...-man-builds-wo... Way to go Muhammed! Wil I remain extremely skeptical that the thing flys until I see a picture or video of it in the air. I mean, 133 hp?? With heavy Toyota car seats (4 of them)? Don't the smallest helios have over 200 hp? Ricky Other articles on the helicopter have reported its maximum altitude as seven feet. He is hoping to build one that will achieve fifteen feet. Still an achievement, as that is untethered. Charles |
#2
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
An accomplishment? Or an accident looking for a crash site?
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. Mubarak says he learned the basics of helicopter flying through the internet after he decided it would be easier to build a chopper than a car. Flying his creation is easy, he claims. "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." Undeterred that his home-made transporter, which lives in a hangar on campus, lacks the gear to measure atmospheric pressure, altitude and humidity, Mubarak is working on a new machine which "will be a radical improvement on the first one in terms of sophistication and aesthetics." A two-seater with the ability to fly at 15 feet for three hours at a time, Mubarak's new creation will be powered by a brand-new motor straight from Taiwan, normally found in motorbikes. |
#3
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:37:27 -0800 (PST), wrote in
: Plenty of homebuilts here never got off the ground because they are still in the garage after 20, 30? years and never get built. Come on... give the youth credit for ambition. Exactly. Not only that, but: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/homemade-...unk-313408.php 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 here, using the money he makes from repairing cellphones and computers. Eight months! Who has built anything that flies in 8 months? MMmmm..I guess I have: http://www.dighera.com/otto_meet_5-23-71_larry.avi :-) http://www.dighera.com/otto_meet_5-23-71.avi (These take a little time to load; be patient.) It still took about a month of weekends to complete. Historical information he http://groups.google.com/group/rec.a...a?dmode=source |
#5
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
cavelamb himself wrote:
An accomplishment? Or an accident looking for a crash site? 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. Mubarak says he learned the basics of helicopter flying through the internet after he decided it would be easier to build a chopper than a car. Flying his creation is easy, he claims. "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." Undeterred that his home-made transporter, which lives in a hangar on campus, lacks the gear to measure atmospheric pressure, altitude and humidity, Mubarak is working on a new machine which "will be a radical improvement on the first one in terms of sophistication and aesthetics." A two-seater with the ability to fly at 15 feet for three hours at a time, Mubarak's new creation will be powered by a brand-new motor straight from Taiwan, normally found in motorbikes. I make it an accomplishment, AND probably also an accident waiting to happen;hopefully not. Just figuring out the hard numbers and applying them to available parts and achieving untethered flight for even a few feet, considering everything involved in doing that, marks this fellow as someone with unusual talent. Fron the looks of that thing however, I sincerely hope some legitimate helo company offers this guy a steady job before his talent ends up being wasted by his experimenting any deeper into the highly complicated world of helo flying. After accomplishing what he has done already, I'd not like to see him injured or killed for lack of suitable employment. -- Dudley Henriques |
#6
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
wrote in message ... OK. Maybe you are right. Some of us will have to arrange a trip to Nigeria to verify it. You go ahead, I can't afford it. Not worth my time. The burden of proof for a claim like this is on the person making the claim, not the person reading about the claim. How hard can it be for Muhammed to have a friend take a picture of the contraption in flight? Not as hard as making it fly, I presume. So where is this evidence that it is a hoax? Lack of credulity on my part: 1) Failure to show the aircraft in flight. 2) No valid source exists for the news as reported by the blogs. The "Yahoo" link is bogus. The "raw feed" link is merely another blog. 3) The craft looks like it can't fly for various reasons. 4) It was built from junk in 8 months of spare time. He found all these parts in a junk yard and made them work together for controlled helicopter flight in eight months -- but only in his SPARE TIME. Hmm. Must have a lot of that spare time and some damned fine junk yards at his disposal. 5) No machining required. Apparently he didn't have to machine ANYTHING for a completely custom, one-off vehicle. Or does he have lathes and other machine tooling stuff at his ready disposal? Welders, sheet metal manipulating equipment, digital equipment and interfaces to make the "joystick" work as a controller. That stuff takes time. More time than 8 months of spare time. And you know, he's never done anything like this before! This would be an amazing, and very unlikely, job to pull off ANYWHERE in the world. Lets see this logic. If a report is from the western world it is assumed true (innocent until proven guilty). If a report is from Nigeria (and some other places) than it is assumed to be a hoax (guilty, of anything we want to assume, until proven innocent). It has nothing to do with location in my opinion. If that contraption were in my neighbor's backyard here in "the western world" and he said, "hey, it flies. It flies up to 7 feet in the air," I'd say "great, let's see it." It has to do with lack of evidence that flight was ever performed in the unique device pictured in a single picture only SITTING FIRMLY ON THE GROUND. The burden is not on me to prove that it can fly or that it can't. It's at least possible I think, so, let's see it. Is it too much to ask to see more pictures before you believe a story like this? More food for thought. Am I the only one that can't see a tail rotor on the tail boom? Also, the main rotor shaft appears to be about 1" in diameter, with little if any outboard bearing near the hub, perhaps even a universal joint. Could this really be successful at harnessing 133 hp, at 400 rpm or so? I have serious doubts as well. Here is a couple more photos but still not much help. http://www.afrigadget.com/2007/10/22...ains-by-storm/ |
#7
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and a new pilot/engineer is born.
Maxwell wrote:
More food for thought. Am I the only one that can't see a tail rotor on the tail boom? There is a tail rotor back there I just can't see what could be driving it. |
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