Indian inventor dies in homemade helicopter accident

Safety costs money.

All those masks, gloves, helmets are not cheap in India. Saddest thing is even if it's being made in India the raw material for making this comes from China and taxed by Indian customs.

If you've choice between buying yourself protective gears vs a new welder to weld the rotor which one do you think will be take him one step closer to his dream?

Sure protective gear can give him more time but most have choices to make, if he could fly this helicopter off the ground, highly likely he also knew about the protective gears yet he choose to not have any maybe because he didn't have much money.

Another factor is that safety gears (atleast what is available in India) is not developed keeping the weather condition in mind. On construction sites, I have observed that in hot and humid weather, the workers hate wearing safety gears as it makes them very uncomfortable. Some even fear that it'll give them a heat stroke in such conditions, and thus avoid it.

Yes, this is a very good point. Access to good tools is essential to do this kind of work safely, you can have all the knowledge in the world, if you can't measure accurately, test your welds non-destructively, machine things without adding stresses that the material is ill equipped to handle and assemble properly then it is very easy to mess things up in a critical way. Miss an inclusion in a weld (which could very easily happen), have some vibration due to imbalance, a hairline fracture from metal fatigue and with a helicopter as your project it can only end in one way.

When I visited India, I drove by this area where there were there were stalls with Indians breaking up old rusty equipment back into parts. Much respect. I think people in the west, don't have a clue how hard some people work for so little return.

This is so true.

It sucks India does not have a hardware ecosystem similar to Shenzhen. There is no capital available for independent innovators who want to build hardware products. There are few skilled engineers who can develop the tooling required to make parts like screws, fittings etc. at a scale and price that makes sense for the market. Import duties to encourage import substitution have only made parts more expensive and made logistics more complex.

I think the attention given to IT services and software companies and startups has left the hardware industry without talent or capital. If you can make 5-10x as a software engineer than a tooling engineer, it makes zero sense to study mechanical engineering.

Sorry to hear that. It’s definitely a tragic story. I ordered some things from McMaster Carr just the other day and it arrived within a few days. I get frustrated sometimes when the parts I need have to ship from China and take a month. But they are cheap and they’ll arrive eventually.

It’s definitely sad to see genius wasted because the tools just sometimes aren’t available in places like India.

Thanks for this information, it’s easy living in the US to forget just how easy our lives are in so many different ways.

As a noob robotics learner I ran into tools challenges very early on. There are some online places but as you pointed out the quality is outright bad. I just gave up that hobby as i didn’t find it worth all the frustration.

During a business trip to Berlin I visited a typical departmental store and was absolutely blown away by all sorts of tools being sold. I was like a kid in a candy store. I mean it wasn’t even a specialized store but a Walmart kind of generic store. Imagine how it’d be in a dedicated hardware store!

Agree so much. There is a huge gap in availability of quality components in India. Very difficult to get and even if we get, very costly.

But I guess it is time for us to have stores like the ones in US, large hardware stores.

One would assume that if you have the resources to attempt to build something that resembles a helicopter, you would have a way to source a cloth strip to tie yourself to the seat.

Not trying to diminish the magnitude of the disaster, but I think your argument does not apply in this case

What do you farm and invent?

I work in Ag-Tech and I've got some interest in India, seems like a growing country (though still with a lot of issues as you point out...)

Would love to hear about what you do.

>India doesn't have any marketplace for makers like Ebay

Never going to forgive flipkart for killing ebay india, it was a heaven for tinkereres.

Has there ever been an attempt at solving the problem with a cooperatively owned retailer? They're a little old school but useful for changing markets that are dysfunctional, and overcoming a lack of capital by allowing members to combine their (individually too small) means.

Similarly, are there groups where people with these interests communicate about how frustrated they are?

Agree with this completely.

Moreover, India as a country has a lax attitude towards safety. When you are fighting to get the basic stuff, the safety aspect does not even cross most people's minds. This can be observed pretty much everywhere. In most construction sites here we don't see the workers wearing hard hats, which are seen as a bare necessity in developed countries.

As someone pointed out, in this case the accident could have been prevented by forming a makeshift seat-belt out of cloth, but the inventor probably wasn't thinking about safety at all.

He was able to procure helicopter parts, presumably he was able to procure a rope to tie himself down.

While there's some truth to this, I think there's often too much regard for 'jugaad' in many parts of India which sometimes just manifests as 'penny wise pound foolish' behaviour.

I believe you when I read this, but my primary takeaway is that given these constraints, you should not try to build a homemade helicopter

> Surprisingly no startup has taken this issue seriously.

There are few tiny startups catering to small niche e.g. https://diy-india.com sells tiny screws, shafts etc. for reasonable price. But they hardly get the support needed to scale up to something like McMaster-Carr, Which the startups emulating western startups or EdTech startups get in India.

With Chinese eCommerce sites banned, The time for entering this market has never been more lucrative.

P.S. I run a validation platform and I have started to track this need-gap - https://needgap.com/problems/284-online-marketplace-for-hard...

I read somewhere about the postal network in India and how it suffered from a widespread lack of organized addresses. If it's still true, perhaps this is a contributing factor to why it might be hard to keep up and achieve scale for eBay clones?

The old line of rotary-wing aircraft "beating the air into submission" is so gloriously accurate on every level. Those pilots are wired different, kind of like submariners (checklists, roles/responsability, ...) in order to deal with their complex environment.

Nowhere near the same level, but one of my proudest moments in gaming as a teenager was being able to complete a single mission in Search and Rescue 4. It took many, many hours of futzing with the game interface, and even more hours reading up on helicopter controls on the Internet. Without the latter, I couldn't really understand what's going on with the controls.

I know it's just a videogame, but it gave me a deep respect for helicopters, in a way that normal flight sims didn't give me for jet planes.

In the process, I've also learned a bit about the mechanics surrounding the drive train and the main rotor blade, and to this day I'm impressed by how it was made to work. You have a couple tons of metal, + fuel and people, hanging from the sky off a spinning rod with lots of tiny, rotating parts. The more I think about it, the more I realize I still don't have a good intuition for strength and wear-resistance of materials involved.

I wish I could fly one for real. Maybe in another life, when I'm someone with more time, money and risk tolerance. For now, I'll just wait for someone to build a nice VR simulator, and maybe my friend and I can resume our high-school competition in autorotating after simulated engine failure in bad weather.

There still are helicopters that are controlled purely mechanically with no assistance from electronics etc. There are lots of small helicopters, not unlike the craft in the article, flying every day.

Flying helicopters is pretty difficult (I've only done it in sims, and I'm moderately good at it after a lot of hours), but most of them are not like unstable jet fighters that can't fly without computer control.

That said, autopilots and gyro stabilization are pretty common in modern helicopters.

There's an old joke that anyone who studies physics knows that helicopters are imposible.

It seems rather unlikely that others would be encouraged by his death.

> I have seen pics and video of the copter. Its a frame, and some blades, welded in some shop. Not safe.

Not only that, but how well did he really know how to fly a helicopter or any other aircraft? It's pretty bold to be your own test pilot when you haven't had instruction in the first place.

Here's why you don't try to fly an unfamiliar aircraft without instruction, even if you have a pilot's license: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAwwKoz8Diw

Years ago, when I was taking sailplane lessons*, someone brought his brand-new autogyro to the airport. For all practical purposes, it was just a frame with a pilot's seat and a column for the main rotor. He fired it up, started down the runway, pulled back on the stick too soon and too far, and went tumbling when the main rotor contacted the ground. He was securely belted in and didn't get hurt, but his brand-new toy was a total loss.

* I got cold feet after a scary but harmless crosswind landing.

True that. Most important part that is not taught in engineering is, testing. Anybody can make anything, even rockets are not so difficult, but creating a testing and checking framework around the build system takes all the efforts. Elon musk said that, almost 100 times more efforts go towards design and making system that make rockets than actually designing rockets. Some conveniently forget the first ( most Tesla and spacex competition ) and fails miserably.

The same could be said for nearly every pioneer of the sky (and sea) and for most explorers in general. Many died, and we celebrate the successes for de-risking that frontier for the rest of us.

> his efforts could have been used somewhere else.

I take your sentiment to be heartfelt, but putting one's competitive advantage to the collective above one's dreams sounds rather joyless. Anyway, the Market provides ample incentive to abandon dreams and chase one's maximum value; perhaps it just wasn't offering enough in this man's case.

So many Indians die for easily preventable accidents. LiveLeak is full of them. You shouldn't even think about their train rides and their adrenaline games.

In this particular case, his neck wouldn't have been hit/cut if it had stayed inside the plane of the open frame door.

Anything could have happened. But for what did happen, a 4 point belt would have sufficed.

If not on this flight then on one of the subsequent ones, experimental helicopters are not something for those not schooled in materials science. The good news is that nobody else got injured or killed, that could have easily happened.

When I built that windmill I spent hours planning individual welds, ensuring no inclusions, grinding the mating surfaces to get a perfect fit before welding, annealing them properly, magnafluxing them afterwards to make sure that it wouldn't come apart due to some weld inclusion. It had a safety factor of four because there was a house within throwing range of the blades, and a variable pitch windmill is essentially a helicopter in a different plane. Design speed was 600 RPM, the hub was spun to double that with some weights attached and the plane of rotation angled such that even if it came apart the debris would not cause any damage.

As soon as you start spinning large things fast you need to be really careful.

A windgust managed to overspeed it (it is very impressive to see your homemade windmill break the sound barrier at the tips) and the machine survived without any damage at all.

That was very briefly the most power that it ever made. When the storm died down we pulled it down and modified the governor to ensure that that would never happen again, better safe than sorry.

There is nothing inherently safer about using seatbelts per se.

In fact seatbelts can kill you. I have a friend that went out with his has car and a friend 20 years ago, they did drink too much and had an accident. He was expelled by the acceleration the car had(because he used no seatbelt) while his friend burned alive inside the car.

What makes seatbelts generally safer is that it is a single point of failure, you leave only one possibility for the position of occupants, so you could put a team of engineers working around this single point of failure and develop solutions for that, like now that you know all your occupants remain inside you can make the deposit to absorb impacts, or you can use airbags, that are useless or even dangerous without using seatbelts.

Without seatbelts , there is almost infinite possibilities and combinations of failure, and you can not design against that.

But a solo enthusiast in India has not this luxury.

What he means is, we already invented the helicopter and it is very advanced machinery. I wish instead of a helicopter, this inventor chose something like a glider or a plane.

There's a list of inventors who were killed by their own inventions on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_...

Helicopters are particularly unforgiving in this respect.

Yep and it's always tempting to push the envelope and attain a tantalizing achievement, even though the safety precautions necessary would cost more than you can afford.

I wouldn't put much stock in those comments. Every cat video also contains comments that the cat is either about to die or the owner is abusing the cat.

Very common in rural areas too - I wonder if it's mainly being able to find someone to teach it.

In the modern era TFM includes so many warnings and disclaimers as to be nonsensical.

When nothing had warnings unless it needed it you took the warnings seriously. When a screwdriver comes with a warning and internet commenters get whipped into a frenzy because some youtuber didn't preface an advanced topic with an introductory safety lecture you don't know what to take seriously and you are effectively on your own. It's the same old information overload problem we've seen in other areas.

I've met enough old blokes missing fingers from workplace accidents to know that's not the case.

>Safety is pretty easy, just envision what would happen if you fucked up

I do see what you mean, but you can still get hurt even if you do everything "right". Angle grinders, for example, can shatter even if you don't break any safety rules. Hopefully your safety equipment works, but really hard shards flying around at 10,000 rpm are unpredictable.

> Safety is pretty easy, just envision what would happen if you fucked up.

If you make something fool-proof, the universe will invent a better fool.

Imagining every possible failure mode is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Some modes aren't obvious until you begin using the device. Some modes aren't obvious until they happen.

What a weird way of looking at things. With that frame of mind, I could explain all the issues I've had ever. "Oh, I hit that wall on the way out from the parking? Too bad I didn't have a racing education, then it would have been prevented" and blame it on lack of education.

The reason he was killed was because the main rotor hit his head. It did so because it wasn't following safety precautions. None of that has anything to do with his formal education.

There are lots of highly educated people in the world who have been exposed to lots of knowledge in their field and still don't adhere to best practices/common sense or even the most basic understanding of their discpline they were taught. So no, we can't say this is what killed him.

True. His ignorance proved fatal.

Your answer sounds typical of someone who has never tried to accomplish anything meaningful. No shade to you personally. I have a bias and a healthy respect for people who make things with their hands, and in their own way, move humanity one step forward physically. Tangibly. My own work as a software developer seems puny and inconsequential.

The worlds best engineers with Billions of dollars in multi-year budgets, who know about and exposed to a lot of knowledge about "complexities of building machines"...even they fall short.

[Space Shuttle Columbia disaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disas...)

Spot the difference?

The engineers of Columbia are probably still alive after that monumental fuck up. Did anyone question their credentials? Education? What high school they went to? What modules they took on their mech engineering classes?

The hypocrisy of attributing a failure to a lack of education is morally inept at best, and disingenuos at worst.

But my fear is more base. My fear is that the man is from a third world country and that your answer might be drawing an already unfair conclusion from that fact. I hope my fears are wrong and you are just being objectively pessimistic.

I guess it's caused by not learning enough instead of learning too much?

The problem with YouTube as an alternative to formal education is that it doesn't tell you what you don't know.

YouTube should warn people that its content shouldn't be mistaken for a comprehensive education on a dangerous topic.

No, learn too little, they will hurt themselves.

People get used to industrial machinery too. Reminds me of the old saying, that a carpenter loses their finger when they stop respecting the saw.

In a professional setting, you have at least two forces ensuring your safety. Your own survival instinct is one. The other one is your boss being liable for accidents at work. Even if you feel super comfortable with your practice, there are other people who'll try to prevent you from doing something stupid - and they have power over you, because as your bosses, they can deny you the access to the workshop.

With a solo op, that second force is missing.

I wish I had the drive and discipline to write about some of the things I have done; airplanes, software projects, etc. but I just get so caught up in the process itself, I don't have the energy to to write about the process. I love reading other peoples descriptions of their journeys and am envious they can do amazing things and also write about them during and after.

Peter Sripol on youtube has made four airplanes from scratch.

These inventors are usually from very poor countries trying to replicate a known vehicle. I strongly believe most of them are doing it to get some sort of recognition or to get funded to achieve financial freedom (or to find a job?).

Tuk Tuk didn't show anything extra other than having solar panels on the sides. Simply, slapping several panels to a solar charger for lithium battery pack to operate an ebike-ish drive is not an invention in my opinion.