Sunday Folayan is the owner of the flying object, a quadrocopter, that crashed into a building at Omiremi Quaters, Awotan Ibadan. Folayan, speaks with Maruf Bello on the incident, especially his passion for flying, among other issues. Excerpts:

You are an electrical electronic engineer, recently something happened in Apete area of Ibadan when a flying object flew into a house. What do you think happened that day and how would you explain to Nigerians the true picture of the event?
What really happened that day that was widely reported in both the online and print media and which I had blogged about on my personal web blog is that quadrop copter that I was calibrating accidentally drifted and landed on a neigbhor’s roof, damaging the roof in the process but thank God no life was lost in the process. A quadropcopter is an electronic toy that can be controlled remotely and like every electronic, has the ability to be controlled to do variety of things. It works with by communicating with radio signal with the hand-help controls and, of course, it has propellers with which it can fly and batteries to sustain it in the flight.

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Are you saying the object is not harmful?
The object is not harmful. But of-course, like every device, if it is not well handled, harm can come to people. But I can tell you that there was no malicious intention in the use of the object that day. I must also say that, it came down gracefully and not with force like a stone. The people confirmed that every time they tried to pull it down, it rolled into the air. It was actually able to hover, even in the midst of the control I lost.

You said you lost its control…
Yes, I lost its control but it was still hovering and didn’t drop like a stone. According to a follow up research that I did, the object got stuck in an antenna at a point when they retrieved it. It was not dead on the ground. The propellers and rotor were still working.

But we were told that the object flew through the same means that it came broke into the toilet, how do you explain that?
That was absolutely untrue. It was a total fabrication. It did not even get into the toilet or that it broke the tiles on the roof and the tiles fell. But If you look at the size of the object and the size of the tiles, you will discover that it could not have broken or descended into the toilet. This QRX 350 object is freely available on the internet together with the flight characteristics. It does not have eyes, so it could not have seen that there was an object on its path to turn and avoid or tilt to avoid it. The size of the copter is bigger than the hole that was punched on the roof. I quite understand the hype by the people because the people have never seen such object before. It is not a new phenomenon.

We know that you have passion for flying things like that, could you educate people more on the object itself?
The quadrocopter is a toy that can fly. . It has four propellers which are standing vertically. An helicopter has one propeller which is also standing vertically, but with a small propeller at the tail which is used to balance the rotation of the big single propeller. But the quadropcopter has four propellers which turn in alternate directions so that they balance each other and it is able to gently rise up or land from where it took off. The third type of craft is what we call fixed wind aircraft, which usually have their propellers perpendicular so they need to run forward to be able to attack the air and fly and they fly in a particular direction. A quadrop copter and an helicopter can fly in any direction; they don’t need to gain speed to move forward.They are easier to fly in smaller areas and control. There are some other models depending on the engine. That particular model that was in the roof has an electric engine. Some come with jet engine, real jets. Miniature version of the engine in bigger airplane. They can move more faster. Only professionals who are skilled fly models that come with jet engine. Quadropcopters are easy to manipulate and control. That’s why they are popular. There are many applications, they are useful in agriculture. For example, you can use them to spray a farm efficiently as much as a big helicopter will spray. It might be used for biological control. For example, if your farm is infested by bees and you want to control them, you can fly a quadropcopter into the midst and clear the whole place. There is also the use in architecture, surveillance of an area and so many civil uses. Let me not also deny the fact that it also has military applications we should give to the people in military and defense to bother about. It is not my own interest.

Could you to put in perspective the use of this particular object that was in the news recently?
As I said, this object is being used for civil application. Getting to fly it itself is an hobby. Only those who have the passion for it can fly it. Number two, you can use it at a video production. If you look at the typical home video that we see today, you want to record a scene of a car driving out of the house and you are following the car. What most producers do is to mount a camera on okada, which is very dangerous. But if the camera is mounted on a quadropcopter, the camera can easily follow the car and record all the video scenes without disturbing the people or road users. I think that is the future of Nollywood.

How would you now relate this experience judging from the hoopla your test flight recorded?
Well, some contentions are appropriate. A man of my educational level should have reported to the police when I missed the craft in the first place, but I didn’t report. The sole reason I didn’t report was that I kept fighting myself about how do I describe it to the police? What do I tell the police? It is like going to the police to report that you have killed an animal but you could not describe it. I did wrestle with it in my mind, I regret I did not do it. It also pointed out the fact to me that I am not an exception to an average Nigerian. An average Nigerian will not see the need to go to the police if anything is missing or any thing strange happens. In truth, the police is supposed to be our friends but there is so much bureaucracy, so much troubles associated with making very little information available in the society and you find out that the amount of time I have expended on this issue, talking to every type of security, military, para-military agencies is just mind-boggling and expensive. It is actually not equal or close to the amount of time and resources that I have lost just trying to get this issue sorted out. So most times, citizens look at whether it is worth the while or not and decide that it is of no use going through the rigors of reporting incidents like this to the police. So if we streamline our reporting processes to law enforcement agencies, people are not over-grilled, evidence is taken as presented for what it is worth and cross- checked, I think citizen will cooperate more with the police.

You also said something about talking with the security agencies since the report was published, how would you relate the experience with what they are doing in the manner they interrogated you?
I don’t know what they are doing. Mine is not to determine what they are doing, but I spoke to professionals. I spoke to people who knew their jobs and onions because when things like this happens, people begin to throw so many languages at you, and as a citizen, we need to understand what these things are and what they are meant for. One of them was trying to get me to say what I don’t want to say, but I was determined and said look, the particular quadropcopter that I flew had a camera for point of view flying. You are flying it as a pilot in the plane. So you can see the front, speed, the altitude and the distance you have moved. But trouble started because the video went blank, obviously because it went out of range and secondly, the geographic positioning system which shows exactly where it was went off because the feet that carried the GPS compact was broken in the process when people were trying to wrestle with the craft. It has that camera purposely for flying and not for surveillance. For surveillance, you would have inserted a recorder into it, which could be memory chip, flash drive but it was not installed on that camera and the security men confirmed it. So, obviously, if you are not recording what you are viewing, it is not surveillance. Surveillance without recording is useless. The second thing is, if you are recording and the person you are recording knows that you are recording, it is a difference scenario from when you are recording and the person you are recording does not know you are doing so. One is espionage, the other one is surveillance. If you put a camera in your shop and say, don’t steal in my shop. If anybody comes in and sees the camera, that is surveillance. You are not trying to record for another purpose, it is just to stop people from stealing from your shop. But if you install a camera in the bathroom and people go there to shower naked and you are recording their picture, that is spying, because if they know they are on camera, they won’t take of their clothes. So you cannot say because somebody put a surveillance camera in a place, he’s therefore spying. They are two different things and they should be separated. I was very glad that our security agencies could establish the fact that there was no intended malice in this mishap.

Any word of advice for Nigerians about security arrangements right now?
I believe that we are very competent security men and women in Nigeria. Security apparatus like any where in the world cannot carry out the work of securing the lives and properties of the people without information, but again information should be given in a non sensational atmosphere.

http://whatsupibadan.com/2014/01/06/why-i-didnt-report-my-missing-quadrocopter-to-the-police-folayan-owner-of-ibadan-crashed-object/

too long, will be back to read it

He was scared of being labelled enemy of the state ....abi how e wan take explain to those illiterate policemen say he wasn't a spy? Imagine newspaper reporter reporting a drone from US ...Texas because battery has TX ....mumu people

The part I don't get is....why and what an old man like you is doing with a TOY?

Having something of that nature in your possesion and not reporting to Police or give a record of it as your property was a mistake on your path as a learned gentleman. The authority may take you as a spy even if you are not.