Ancien médecin chinois Jin Shaozhi, gauche, assis dans sa Honeybee fabriqués en Chine-3C super light avion pose avec un caméraman sur une route sous const
Retired Chinese doctor Jin Shaozhi, left, sitting in his Chinese-made Honeybee-3C super light plane poses with a videographer on a highway under construction in Jinyun county, Lishui city, east China's Zhejiang province, 20 April 2012. A retired doctor in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang spent years fulfilling his dream of flying his own aircraft. Jin Shaozhi, now 71, loved building model planes since he was studying at middle school. He became a doctor at a local hospital in Jinyun county, Lishui city, after graduating from university dozens of years ago. Later he worked as a part-time aeromodelling coach at a local school in his 30s and led his team to good achievements in some national amateur competitions. After retirement, Jin opened a private clinic to serve local residents. To realize his dream of flying aircraft, he started to learn flying planes at an aviation club in 2006 in the neighbouring city of Jiande and received flight training in other bigger cities like Beijing and Xi'an. After that, he started to assemble second-hand super-light planes he bought from an aircraft dealership in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. But Jin felt these aircraft had poor flight performance as the Chinese-developed Honeybee-series was designed mainly for farming purposes. So he decided to build his own homemade aircraft to fulfill his dream. Over the next years, the retired doctor managed to churn out two aircraft: one is a fixed-wing plane and the other is a helicopter. He named the chopper "White Swan" after spending about 100, 000 yuan (US$16, 300) building it, including the 30, 000-yuan second-hand engine he bought from abroad. The aircraft is in principle able to fly as high as 1, 000 meters but Jin just made a 500-meter-high flight for safety reasons.
