| Most of the original airplane inventors died testing their inventions, and even more helicopter and submarine - and half of the X-plane pilots. It sounds like he was using the "tie it to the ground with a rope" technique, which most of the pioneers used, so credit for that. I'd probably go further than just a rope (a telescoping ground mounting with pipes), but note that ground resonance can still destroy a helicopter and kill you. Building personal full-size airplane models is common across India and China, but this is the first time I heard of one with an engine and that was flyable. (In the US, most people can afford to be involved in aviation, but it's 10x outside the affordability of the average person in the developing world.) Hanna Reitsch, the famous woman Nazi test pilot, actually became famous for demoing the first production helicopter, the Fa 61, daily at a "fair" inside a building (!), so some people are just really talented at flying. Ironically, after being captured by the British, she was released because although she was a great test pilot at manipulating the controls, she knew nothing about aeronautical engineering beyond subjective descriptions like, "the controls were too heavy", etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Reitsch |