Build your own plane from recycled junk

The man who built his plane using YouTube videos

For three years, car mechanic Paen Long stayed up long after his wife went to bed each night, spending countless hours watching videos on YouTube.

But these weren't the viral clips or pop music videos that most people while away hours on. Mr Long, who lives on the side of a highway in Cambodia's rural south-east, had a singular obsession: aeroplanes.

"In the beginning, I typed in the word 'jet'," he says. From there, he was led to videos that showed planes taking off and landing, flight simulations, and virtual tours of factories that produce aircraft.

One of six children of rice farmers, Mr Long grew up in the years when Cambodia was struggling to recover from the devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge and had never been in an aircraft of any kind.

After seeing a helicopter when he was about six years old, he says, the urge to fly preoccupied his mind - for decades. "I always dreamt about aircraft every night. I always wanted to have my own plane," he says.

At first, it remained nothing more than a dream. Mr Long dropped out of school early and trained as a mechanic, one of the few non-farming professions available to young men without a high school education in his home province of Svay Rieng.

By last year his fascination with flight had taken over and Mr Long, now aged 30 and running his own garage in neighbouring Prey Veng province, decided he had saved enough money to realise his childhood fantasy.

"I started building a plane, making it in secret," he says. "I was afraid that people would make fun of me, so sometimes I worked at night."

Believing that a helicopter would be more complex to re-create than a plane, Mr Long based his design on a Japanese plane used in WWII. The one-seater aircraft, which has a wing span of 5.5m, took Mr Long almost a year to produce entirely from scratch out of mostly recycled materials.

The pilot's seat is a plastic chair with chopped-off legs, the control panel a car dashboard, and the body made from an old gas container.

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I can recall a Canadian chap who spent about a decade doing the same sort of thing, there was a 1 to 2 hour documentary about him

That's awesome. Good on him.

Reminds me that there was a Kiwi bloke Bruce Simpson who built his own cruise missile in his shed. Nothing illegal about it so the government sent the tax department after him in a bid to shut him down. Now he is building another one.

Edited By Hopper on 03/06/2017 10:15:02

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I have just read about this guy on the BBC news site.

His wife it seems is concerned. ........... I wonder why.?

But best of luck to the man.

Nick

Its a shame someone hasn't got a microlite they could give him. Must be quite a few that he could patch up and fly.
BobH

And the name of the journalist who wrote the report? "Ouch Sony"!

Priceless. Absolutely priceless. What a wonderful world we live in!

Edited By Simon Williams 3 on 03/06/2017 20:09:12