Only female of Air Force’s team designed Nigeria’s first indigenous military-grade aerial vehicle

Flight Lieutenant Nkemdilim Anulika Ofodile is an aerospace engineer with Nigeria Air Force.

She is the only female in the team of Air Force’s aerospace engineers, and she is credited for designing Nigeria’s very first indigenous military-grade unmanned aerial vehicle.

Nicknamed Tsaigumi, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was revealed in 2018 and it was built in collaboration with UAVision of Portugal. The Air Force announced that the vehicle was supposed to be used for intelligence surveillance and recognizance operations in land and sea domains.

Ofodile claimed that “I am happy to have worked under such a team of innovative people (talking about the UAV). We seem to have collaborated nicely and everything we’ve done has resulted in the aircraft that was inducted including its ground control station.

Flight Lieutenant Nkemdilim Anulika Ofodile. Image credit TMZNaija

“The avionics team have done quite a lot to get the aircraft to where it is, including the structures team – those that designed the body of the aircraft itself.

“I do hope that we do get a chance to get some more people with such calibre of knowledge and experience to work with us in the future to upgrade into the new that will be worked on,” she concluded.

The 31-year-old Ofodile is very knowledgeable and very high skilled. She holds a PhD in Control Engineering from the University of Leicester, United Kingdom, and she’s currently teaching HND, PGD, and MSc students in the Aircraft Maintenance and Aircraft Engineering Departments respectively at Nigeria’s Air Force Institute.

Nonetheless, she has also been carrying out research and modifications on aircraft avionics and development of solutions to avionics issues experienced on Nigerian Air Force (NAF) aircraft platforms. Hugely involved in the continuous collaboration with a multi-disciplinary team of engineers on the development of the NAF “Gulma” UAV and other NAF research-related projects, she designed a vehicle "Top of Form Bottom of Form" capable of day and night operations.

Aerial Vehicle, known as the Tsaigumi Tactical UAV. Image credit TMZNaija

Indeed, the UAV has an operational endurance above 10 hours, a service ceiling of 15,000 feet and a mission radius of 100km with a maximum take-off weight of 95 kg and its payload is an electro-optic/infrared camera system.

Good luck and well done you Nkemdilim Anulika!