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Jimu News reporter Yang Jinying

An aviation enthusiast who graduated from junior high school, worked as a car mechanic and a truck driver. He returned to his rural hometown at the age of 27 and started building airplanes.

Such an inspirational plot sounds like it happened in a hot-blooded comic book, but it is the true life story of Zhu Shiquan, a 41-year-old man from Tengzhou, Shandong.

Since 2010, Zhu Shiquan has built 18 airplanes. He has not made much money, but he has persisted. This spring, he renovated the hangar in his hometown and plans to assemble another airplane for a test flight this year. "When will it be completed?" Faced with this question, Zhu Shiquan thought for a while and said, "I will keep doing it."

Zhu Shiquan works in the hangar

Building airplanes in farmland

Fengzhong Village, Nanshahe Town, is located in the south of Tengzhou City, Shandong Province. It has a flat terrain and is mainly agricultural. Among the houses and farmlands in this village, there stands an aircraft hangar that is out of place. It is here that villager Zhu Shiquan pursued his dream of flying. In 14 years, he made 18 airplanes by himself.

Villager Chen Fei (pseudonym) told reporters that Tengzhou City is not a strong aviation city and does not even have its own airport. Therefore, Zhu Shiquan's experience of building his own airplane seems a wonder to local people.

Zhu Shiquan has been obsessed with airplanes since he was young. After graduating from junior high school, he learned car maintenance and made a living from it. Later, he became a truck driver. He traveled everywhere, but what remained unchanged was his love for model airplanes. During this process, Zhu Shiquan had the idea of ​​making his own manned aircraft to experience flying. The first decade of the 21st century was the starting stage of the development of the domestic Internet. Zhu Shiquan learned through online forums that there were indeed people in China who made manned aircraft and there were successful cases. This made him determined to make aircraft himself.

Of course, it is not easy to build an airplane by yourself. The first thing to overcome is the gap in professional knowledge. For two or three years, Zhu Shiquan eagerly learned aviation-related knowledge, "reading books, checking computers, visiting masters. I have read more than a dozen books on aviation." His favorite book is "Model Aircraft Aerodynamics", a thick introductory book on model aerodynamics, which supplemented him with a lot of theoretical knowledge.

In 2010, Zhu Shiquan was 27 years old, married and had children. He returned to his hometown, bid farewell to his stable life, took out all the savings he had earned from working, and started building airplanes himself.

Zhu Shiquan is assembling aircraft parts

The first airplane was born in the courtyard

To build an airplane, you can't just buy the materials and start building it. Zhu Shiquan first got a blueprint of a foreign sports airplane from an aviation enthusiast in Shenzhen, and spent some time to understand it. "Not only do you have to understand the blueprint, but you also have to understand the designer's design ideas and why each size and structure is designed this way."

Zhu Shiquan also made some improvements based on the drawings. The original aircraft did not look very good, so he modified it to be more beautiful. He also made some structural improvements, changing the rear three-point landing gear to a front three-point one.

Purchasing materials was also a problem. The blueprints were custom made, and there were no ready-made parts to use, so Zhu Shiquan could only ask others to process them in the processing factory. The custom quantity was small, and the factory was unwilling to accept it, so he went to each factory one by one, and it took a long time to collect all the aircraft parts.

Zhu Shiquan uses spruce wood or aviation plywood to make aircraft, which is used to maintain the shape of the aircraft frame. He said that after comparison, the two materials are lighter in weight and have better strength structure. In the 1930s and 1940s, spruce wood was once the first choice for aircraft fuselage materials. In addition, the cost of spruce wood and aviation plywood is relatively low compared to metal, and the processing technology is also relatively simple.

Zhu Shiquan paid a lot of "tuition fees" for the first time he made an airplane. Sometimes after he finished making a part, he found it was not suitable. He had to scrap it and make it again, which wasted a lot of time, money and energy.

In this way, it took more than a year for Zhu Shiquan's first aircraft to be built in his small yard. "At the beginning, there was no hangar, and the conditions were quite difficult. The aircraft was parked in the yard, blocking the door, and people had to lie down to go in and out." Zhu Shiquan smiled generously when recalling the initial embarrassment. Later, in order to better build aircraft, he built a special hangar for easier operation. This spring, he renovated and widened the hangar, which now covers an area of ​​more than 300 square meters and has more professional equipment.

First time flying in the sky

Just building an airplane is just the beginning. In order to test the flight, Zhu Shiquan also had to learn how to fly the airplane. At first, in order to save costs, Zhu Shiquan read books and consulted some old pilots to explore how to fly the airplane. But safe flying is a rigorous system, and professional training is required after all. Zhu Shiquan enrolled in an aviation school and obtained a pilot's license.

Now that you have a plane and a pilot's license, what can you do if you don't have an airport? "Find a relatively open, deserted dead-end road or a patch of grass. Practice slowly there. First try to lift the front wheels of the plane off the ground. Once you've practiced well and run straight, you can drift a little. Practice this back and forth hundreds of times before you dare to really fly," said Zhu Shiquan.

One year after the single-seat sports plane was built, Zhu Shiquan tried to fly it. Unfortunately, the plane flew very low and the flight time was relatively short, so Zhu Shiquan did not think it was really flying.

Soon, Zhu Shiquan disposed of his first airplane and sold it to an aviation collector at half price to recover funds. The money was immediately used to develop and manufacture a second airplane. This time, he truly experienced the feeling of flying into the blue sky with the airplane he made.

"When I first flew into the sky, the first thing I experienced was fear." Zhu Shiquan said that compared to being completely isolated from the outside world when flying on a civil airliner, the air currents in a small plane are more intuitive and the bumps are more violent, just like driving on an uneven dirt road, with a sudden rise and fall. But once you get used to this panic, it is followed by incomparable excitement. The feeling of floating in the air is extremely exciting and indescribable.

Zhu Shiquan's self-made airplane

18 aircraft built in 14 years

The successful flight inspired Zhu Shiquan's confidence. In the following ten years, he built small aircraft one after another, constantly improving and upgrading them. In the design stage, Zhu Shiquan went from referring to foreign aircraft drawings to drawing his own drawings; in the development stage, he improved the structural strength of the aircraft so that it could withstand greater overloads, and at the same time tried to make the aircraft lighter.

In order to make the aircraft safer, when designing the structure, Zhu Shiquan considered more about how to ensure the safety of the pilot while damaging the structure when the aircraft made a landing error and made a hard landing, and he continued to optimize the plan.

In order to improve the performance of the aircraft, Zhu Shiquan never stopped learning. He often consulted with masters and flew to air shows across the country to learn from them. So far, Zhu Shiquan has successfully developed and manufactured 18 small manned aircraft, which are classified into high-wing, mid-wing, and low-wing; front three-point type, rear three-point type; single-seat and double-seat.

The time he took to manufacture airplanes was also greatly shortened, from more than one airplane a year at the beginning to one airplane every three months, and now he can even manufacture several airplanes at the same time.

Every time an aircraft is successfully developed, it will be sold quickly to recover funds for the next development. Since Zhu Shiquan's aircraft has not undergone the next safety test, it cannot be used for formal aviation purposes. It can only be sold to aviation enthusiasts or scientific research institutions and museums for collection purposes. Some flying friends will also buy the aircraft to study and learn the manufacturing process.

Zhu Shiquan works in the hangar

“I will keep doing it”

In 2021, Zhu Shiquan opened an aviation technology company with the original intention of making it easier to apply for a permit to participate in air shows. He invited several aviation enthusiasts to form a small team to help part-time when they were busy, but when they were too busy, he still took care of everything himself to save some money.

This does not mean that he can start making a living by building airplanes. On the contrary, building airplanes has always been his hobby. He cannot make much money, and may even lose money. It often costs more than 100,000 yuan to build an airplane, but he may only get 50,000 or 60,000 yuan back after selling it. It also takes a while to find a buyer, sometimes even more than a year to sell it.

Now, in addition to cultivating his family's land, Zhu Shiquan also uses drones to help large farms or orchards spray pesticides and weed. He continues to invest his salary in the aircraft manufacturing business. He does not want the outside world to label him too much as a "farmer building aircraft" because he is worried that it will cause misunderstandings that "building aircraft is very simple" and that someone will easily imitate him and build non-standard aircraft, which will lead to danger.

Investing so much money, time and energy with so little return, Zhu Shiquan's family was of course quite dissatisfied at first, but after witnessing his determination and persistence year after year, they began to support him silently.

Zhu Shiquan has also heard the nagging of the village elders for "not doing his job properly" or the ridicule of others who regard his ambition as a joke, but as time goes by, these rumors gradually cannot affect him. He said calmly: "There are definitely some people who don't understand my decision to build an airplane, but there are also people who support it. This is all normal and you don't need to worry about it."

When it comes to the future, Zhu Shiquan has many prospects: he has his own video accounts on multiple platforms, hoping to encourage more people to fall in love with aviation and learn about aviation knowledge;

In addition to small aircraft, he is now starting to develop other models, especially large-load drones, hoping that partners or funders will see his plan and move forward together;

His ultimate dream is to build an airplane that is fun and safe to fly, and that he can give himself a perfect score for. "When will it be done?" Faced with this question, Zhu Shiquan thought for a while and said, "I will keep doing it."

(Source: Jimu News)