Saudi technology buff lives his dream

Ali Al-Suhaibani with one of his drones.

RIYADH: Ali Al-Suhaibani is the first Saudi to develop the RC plane hobby in the Kingdom and said that ever since he was young he had the desire to improve technologies.
“I’ve always been keen on anything mechanical or technological since childhood,” Al-Suhaibani said. “It started with bicycles, toy cars and paper planes. I used to take toys apart to see how they worked and then tried to replicate their technology. Then that evolved into larger more complex things like cars and motorcycles. Finally I settled on aircraft.” 
He added it is always in his nature to try to improve something by making it work better or be bigger.
Al-Suhaibani first saw expats flying their RC planes in the desert in Riyadh about 30 years ago and decided to buy his own RC plane and learned to fly it. He later started experimenting with building his own planes at home after one of his planes crashed and he fixed its damaged wing.
“The men I first saw flying the RC planes had formed a sort of club and so I observed them to learn more about the planes,” he said. “It was mostly my own interest that pushed me to pursue this hobby.”
He first developed RC planes similar to the ones he was flying. Then Al-Suhaibani decided to try something bigger and grander by building an F-16 model plane. After a while he got into jet engines and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).
Al-Suhaibani built the Typhoon, which is a 1/3 scale model of the real typhoon in shape and flying capability, to show what he is capable of building. It is a prototype with fixed landing gear.
He is now close to finishing the first version of it with retractable landing gear, more power and fixing all other bugs from the prototype.
“It happened little by little as I have always had a workshop for my planes in almost every house I’ve lived in,” he said. “So I would collect the material needed for every project and start working on them in my spare time. It started out as a hobby and then developed into a career.”
One of the projects that Al-Suhaibani is currently working on is a UAV aerial target, which is an aircraft used as a target for training purposes, that he built in his workshop at his home. He is developing it to reach certain requirements such as speed, elevation, duration, etc.