Sep 282011
You have got to click on the link and check out the photos of this… contraption.
China: Awesome gentleman builds homemade flying contraption powered by eight motorcycle engines
It’s a “flying platform” along the lines of the Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee, but with a whole lot more engines, a whole lot more propellers, and a whole lot more canvas and zip-ties holding the thing together.
8 Responses to “What could *possibly* go wrong??”
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The sound you just heard was my jaw momentarily dislocating.
When do your official CAD drawings for this vehicle become available? ;-}
He may be nuts, but he’s doing something new. In the old days, Popular Mechanics or Mechanix Illustrated would offer plans. *sigh*
>In the old days, Popular Mechanics or Mechanix Illustrated would offer plans. *sigh*
I was thinking about that myself. Fifty, sixty years ago, Popular Mechanix Science Illustrated was loaded with stories and photos of random Americans building ill-advised vehicles like this in their garages. Today… not so much. What’s changed? Two possibilities occur immediately:
1) Those ideas were just… dumb. They were never going to work, and we finally wised up.
2) We’ve lost that spirit of inventiveness and can-do, coupled with a massive growth of litigation and bureaucracy.
Either way, it’s kinda sad to see that the *Chinese* are picking up where we gave up.
This is what happens when a country has no women.
Take a look at this, Scott:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/12/13/a-boy-powered-submarine/
How to kill your kids! Somewhere on that blog there are articles on “Build your own diving helmet” and “Build your own submarine”, the latter designed to be towed behind a speedboat, with no air supply (“the air in the submarine is sufficent”) and a hatch that screws down from outside! As a blog reader called it: “MM’s two-part series on ‘How to kill yourself underwater'”!
Grif
> How to kill your kids!
Meh. We lost something when the lives of children became *so* sacred that parents wouldn’t even let ’em play outside for fear of one-in-a-million boogeymen.
True that.
The Chinese still more level headed in their interest in aerospace. I seem to remember an article in–Air & Space I think–about the Japanese wanting to change some docking design after they had already been agreed upon. A lot of pageantry. Not that the Chinese don’t know how to show off, as we all saw in the Olympics, what with Yao Ming–the tallest of all the athletes there–holding their flag.
More impressive to me was an interview done years prior. A man in a military uniform was sitting at a desk, speaking about how they could have had a nice enough new opera house without having to have something that looked like it was from “outta space.” While folks in their space program might worry about their budget being raided by folks with similar mentality, it shows that their leadership isn’t just of the flowery variety. I was listening to talk radio the other night or so, and heard some yokel talking about how they would never master the careful dance that is Carrier operations–but that is selling them short.
At any rate, all they need is one carrier to take on Japan, just to have the planes only take off, bomb, and perhaps fly back to the mainland, perhaps with in flight refueling only on the way back. I see this coming as they place their end of the Pacific under the “Manchu doctrine.”