Gabriel Nderitu is building his own plane … in his tiny back yard in Nairobi, Kenya. The engine is from a Toyota Corolla, the wheels from a Mini, instructions from Wikipedia. The aluminium wings, too long for his yard, lie in the street outside his house.
The 42-year old IT engineer developed a passion for flying at school. He studied physics at university and two years ago decided it was time for his dream to take flight. So far it has cost him £5,000. Earlier this month, Gabriel did his first ground test run. The rear landing gear collapsed after 15 yards.
Sat with a first cup of coffee and reading The Guardian, I found Gabriel’s story (Wright stuff: Kenyan builds plane in garden) utterly uplifting - if you will forgive the rather bad pun.
Gabriel’s story reminded me of four other people – all with links to Kenya.
In the early 1970s, you would have read in local press the story of another builder fascinated by technology. I never knew his name - or if I did, I've long since forgottten it. In Nyeri, 90 miles north of Nairobi, a villager was constructing his own submarine. Yes - a submarine, in his own garden. I know not what became of him and his undersea Captain Nemo dreams but I can tell you that Nyeri is approximately 500 miles from the sea at Mombasa.
The second is another aviator. Nanyuki airfield, some 30-odd miles further round Mt Kenya from Nyeri was rumoured locally to have been extended and strengthened by the Americans to take B52 bombers onward to Vietnam. One afternoon, I was at Nanyuki and saw a handbuilt plane line up for take-off at the far end of the long runway. The plane’s engine was said to have come from a 1600cc VW Beetle. The pilot coaxed the plane down the runway, at the end of which was a stand of trees. As the plane trundled along the ground, bouncing into the air and back down again a couple of times, it seemed impossible that it would rise over the tops of the trees, never mind get airborne. At the last moment, the tiny plane heaved itself one last time into the air and, just scraping the very tops of the trees at the far end of the runway, lifted itself and its pilot into the skies. The pilot, I was told, the builder of the plane, was Air Commodore Harold ‘Daddy’ Probyn, First World War fighter pilot and Commandant of Cranwell during the Second World War, after which he emigrated to Kenya to become a coffee farmer. He would have been in his 80s then.
The third was a great Kenyan educator, about whom I have briefly posted before, Peter Chiera. During the most difficult of national circumstances, the struggle for Kenyan independence in the 50s and 60s, Peter Chiera set up an ‘Harambee’ primary school not far from Nyeri,. Today, in the UK, we might call it a “Free School”. When I first met Peter Chiera, his small local village primary school had evolved into a secondary school, funded by the government. I was to help set up the first ‘A’ level courses. Peter Chiera meanwhile was already way ahead of his, looking to a future in which the school had become a distance-learning outpost of Makerere University.
The fourth? Well, that would be myself, a dreamer of conductive education dreams; a builder of fantasies, as some would say, that struggle to take flight, but one persists.
So, today, my thanks, though he most likely will never hear them, go to Gabriel Nderitu, for renewing my own faith in people and a simple belief that things can be done.
