Mubarak Abdullahi, a Nigerian physics undergraduate, spent eight months constructing this machine from junk—including a crashed 747. It has actually flown (seven feet). Details here.
This brings back some memories. In 1986, I was a member of a team that won our state's science quiz competition (Bendel state). We traveled to Kaduna in northern Nigeria to compete at the national level against students from the other, then, 18 states. There were two parts to the competition: the quiz itself and a “project.” There were these two boys, Igbo guys, who designed and built a semi-working helicopter model from spare parts and that's what we used as our project competition entry.
Built out of soldered pipes, scrap wood and a homemade engine of some kind, we jerry rigged the whole thing together and I was called on to design the aerodynamics of it, including designing the control mechanism. It was so much fun trying to figure out the aerodynamics of a helicopter and my brain almost exploded working out the problems. We never actually got it to fly (the first model exploded in a ball of flames when we started the engine), but we understood enough about the aerodynamics of it all that I was able to show how—theoretically—it should fly, complete with the proper equations. We took third place, which wasn't that remarkable considering that the winning entry was a “new” method of making ogogoro or moonshine.
I'm only surprised it wasn't some Igbo guy who did this.
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