Nguyen Bui Hien, a 62 year old mechanical engineer in Southern Vietnam, has recently successfully flight tested his homemade helicopter. Mr. Hien runs his own automobile shop and has built a helicopter before in 2012, which weighed 250kg, was 2.95m x 1.2m x 2.4m and had an engine of 106 horsepower.

His new helicopter though, which he has named Dream, had successfully undergone test flights in an empty field. Mr. Hien reports this was for safety reasons. Dream was able to hover 2m off the ground and flew a distance of 100m. The success of Dream’s test flight was due to the use alloy in the rotor blades and an imported US engine, stated Mr. Hien. As reported by Tuoitre News, Mr. Hien has spent millions of Vietnamese dong on building Dream. He hopes that his prototypes will be able to be used in agriculture as low-cost crop dusters.