During the past summer vacation, a 15-year-old boy designed and built a drone on his own in less than a month, and flew it successfully. Photo: Sina Weibo

 During the past summer vacation, a 15-year-old boy designed and built a drone on his own in less than a month, and flew it successfully.

The boy named Li Banghua, from Hefei in East China's Anhui Province, designed and built the plane completely on his own. The drone is 0.6 meters wide, has a wingspan of 4.4 meters and weighs about 40 kilograms. Li just finished his high-school entrance exams, and the plane was designed and built during his after-school hours, local media reported. 

Li said he has been interested in model aviation and spaceflight since he was a child, and has been studying and building drones for years, but this time the drone is the largest he has ever built and the one he considers the most successful.

"The biggest difficulty I had was the lack of understanding from adults. When I said I was going to build a model plane, a lot of adults thought it was nonsense, so I called myself an adult a lot of the time when I was acquiring raw materials online."

"Throughout the process of building the plane, I encountered seven or eight failures and had got very frustrated, but I decided to persevere," he says, "because once you start something, giving up is not an option."

Global Times