Four-Seat Machine Has Climbed To Seven Feet

Is this man the Igor Sikorsky of a new generation? A 24-year-old undergrad student in Nigeria is getting lots of attention for his creativity, and his daring. The man is so interested in helicopters, he's building them from junked cars and bikes.

Gizmodo reports the man's first aircraft -- a yellow, four-seat chopper -- has made it seven feet off the ground. It's big, at about 39 feet long, uses a Honda Civic engine, and has no flight instruments.

Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi is a physics student who says he used money earned repairing computers and cellphones, and scrounged parts, including pieces from an old 747 crash site, to build his admittedly homely helicopter.

Mubarak hasn't let a lack of available flight instructors slow him down, either. He says he learned about how to fly helicopters on the Internet.

"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."

Mubarak says his next helo will be a two-place machine, powered by a Taiwanese motorbike engine, that will fly at 15 feet for three hours, and be "...a radical improvement on the first one in terms of sophistication and aesthetics."

Sounds familiar...

FMI: www.gizmodo.com