The garage is usually used for storing the car, repairing it and tinkering with it, unless one fine day we get the idea to build ourselves a plane from scratch. This is exactly what happened to Ashok Aliseril Thamarakshan, who fell in love with flying so much during a flight bought for him by his wife for his birthday that he decided to build his own plane and get his pilot license.
His dream of piloting planes came true in 2019 when he received all the necessary documents. However, he quickly came to the conclusion that renting a plane did not make much sense and he started looking for something of his own – His first thought was to buy an older aircraft and restore it, but he eventually began to “feel uneasy about the prospect of flying with his family in an older aircraft he wasn’t familiar with.”
There were also issues of convenience, so in the end the decision was made to build it myself, which was also supposed to allow for “a better understanding of the plane”making it easier to maintain in the long term.” As he explained in an interview with CNN, after looking at do-it-yourself airplane kits, he came across a four-seater plane from South African company Sling Aircraft that met all the requirements.
In January 2020, he flew to the Sling Aircraft factory in Johannesburg for a weekend to test fly the Sling TSi and was so impressed that he decided to buy it. And it all worked out for the best, because when the first packages arrived, the UK was already in the midst of a Covid lockdown.
And it was a time when everyone was looking for some extra work, so building the plane came at the perfect time. Although Thamarakshana counted on the help of colleagues who had experience in the subject, due to limited contacts it turned out to be impossible, so he was left to his own devices. However, this did not stop him in any way, he built a makeshift shed/garage/hangar in the garden, where he started to realize his dream.
He claims that although he thought his engineering knowledge would be most useful during construction, it was actually used to prepare the 7.175 m long and 2.45 m high vessel. the experience turned out to be invaluable… renovation. In his opinion, in principle anyone could build such a plane at home, but not everyone would be able to fly it.
The next stages were overseen by the Light Aircraft Association, the UK’s representative body for the construction and maintenance of home-built aircraft, under a permit from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). It was the latter that eventually issued a “Permission to Fly” when it deemed the craft ready. G-Diya, named after the engineer’s youngest daughter, is expected to reach this point in May 2022.
Currently has already logged 300 flight hours, some of which can be admired on the fly_home_or_away family’s Instagram. You’re probably going to ask, how much does it cost? The man doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a huge financial burden, but he eventually managed to find three pilots to share the unit with, so now, “when the plane is divided equally between four people, it costs us about as much as an SUV.”
It is also worth recalling that we also have some interesting accents in this area. In the late 1960s, the pilot Eugeniusz Pieniążek decided to escape from the persecution of the secret service in this way, secretly constructed a plane and flew on the “Cuckoo” to Yugoslavia. We have also seen similar examples in more recent history, for example in 2022 there was a lot of talk about Waldemar Mazer, who built a working and flying replica of a First World War fighter plane in his garage.
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Source: geekweek.interia.pl
