If this is real, I want in!

Brian fred carr

Site Moderator
Mentor
Yes it was in the daily papers over here today.....well photoshopped ...He would have to have the
muscles of a whole rugby team to get the upstroke going and as for maintaining flight well we
all know what physics are involved there....methinks there gearing up for April fool
 

rlaska

Member
Seems to be real, but it isn't human-powered. The movement of the guy's arms controls a pair of brushless outrunners that flat the wings.
 

MrClean

Well-known member
No, it wasn't. Birds weight relatively nothing. Their bones are hollow, still they have massive muscles dedicated to flight. To anchor these muscles they have a very large breastbone, the muscle around which is delicious.

For any video of a wing large enough to support human weight, suspension for that weight must be accounted for in superstructure. There is absolutely none in that video.
 

rlaska

Member
For any video of a wing large enough to support human weight, suspension for that weight must be accounted for in superstructure. There is absolutely none in that video.

I'm curious, what do you mean by the "suspension for that weight?" He was strapped in, are you saying there wan't enough there to hold him up under the lift of the wing?

It didn't look too different from viable hang glider designs, although I know next to nothing about those, so if there is something very obvious that I missed, it would not come as any surprise to me.
 

xuzme720

Dedicated foam bender
Mentor
Hang-gliders don't have to support the flapping motion and all the dynamic loads that induces into the framework. I think that's what Mr.Clean was getting at. It looks right in the video at first because we are used to seeing that kind of structure supporting a human in a conventional hang-glider but once you start to factor in the loads generated in not only supporting the flapping, but also the opposing force of the motor driving that flapping action.
 

rlaska

Member
Ahh, that makes sense. I wonder if they'll ever come clean with exactly how he did it.
I watched it again, and now I can tell which parts were faked… pretty obvious.
The helmet cam footage could have been done with an RC plane, or an ultralight. The takeoff and landing video are a bit blurry, and do look altered.
 

MrClean

Well-known member
Probably just a model. You know, those supermen with the props in the head look dang near real from any distance. And yes, to support the flapping motion of anything with any kind of weight there has to be some structure underneath. With birds, that don't weigh much, there is a really large breast bone. If a man was just as proportionally shapped, figure another foot and a half ridge down the middle of your chest.

But cheer up. If eventually we get largish space stations that we can visit (which would also be cool but way so dangerous) You COULD have a similar looking setup AND have it work, in micro gravity. There is video somewhere of an astronaut who uses a single strand of her hair to push herself away from the wall of the shuttle. With that little force needed it is easily conceivable that manpowered wing flappin flight would be no problem.

It also destroys the idea that Sandra Bullock had to let George Clooney go in Gravity. It's not like he was hanging off a cliff. The slightest of pulls would bring him back into her albeit at way less of a bone shattering speed that every other, life saving, totally unbelievable collision that they had did.

Ever notice that after getting slapped around by two space station hatches, clooney and a bunch of other stuff, she didn't have ONE bruise on her, well fantastic, body????