Reassembly is his job: Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi, a 24-year-old Nigerian physics student, was able to recycle makeshift materials to build a fully functional helicopter .
Of course, the young man explains to AFP, the aircraft did not fly across the skies at impressive altitudes, it only took off at a couple of meters off the ground there is a lack of fundamental instruments for flight, such as altimeter and barometer, but the impossible cannot be expected from an assembly of materials recovered from the most unthinkable sources.
There are parts of a Boeing 747 that crashed near Kano, the city of the young man, there is the roaring engine of a Honda Civic, there are the seats recovered from the ___pit of a Toyota, all materials purchased with the hard-earned wages resulting from months of work, and with the generous support of the father.
None of the recycled pieces are more recognizable, other than the yellow aluminum body of what The Raw Feed has dubbed the “helicopter made of scrap”. Six meters long and three meters high, there is a control panel equipped with an ignition button, a lever to give power and a joystick to control the direction, as well as a screen that retransmits the images collected by a cam positioned outside the aircraft, to check what happens on the ground.
The idea, explains Mubarak Muhammed Abdullahi, stems from a passion for action films and an innate curiosity: “I watched a lot of action-movies and was fascinated by the way the helicopters flew. I decided it would be easier to build a helicopter rather than a car ”. Said and done, he scrapped up enough information on the Internet and embarked on the eight-month undertaking.
A company that has guaranteed the 24-year-old enough popularity to send a message: he hopes that his wealthy fellow citizens will stop relying on foreign companies and turn to him for their means; he hopes to capture the interest of the local Civil Aviation, to which the young man presented his project, but which proved impervious to his talent and, he says, to that of other young Nigerians.
Gaia Bottà
