I Just Flew In From Holland, And Boy Are My Arms Tired

I Just Flew In From Holland, And Boy Are My Arms Tired

Human Birdwings.

That’s an ornithopter. An ornithopter is an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings like a bird. This one’s human-powered, which is very unusual. When men first started to sniff around flying machines, many naturally looked to nature to design the apparatus to get off the ground. You’ve all seen black and white FAIL video of the ill-starred crosses between the Red Baron and Icarus flapping their wood and canvas wings until the engine shook them to pieces or the ground put an exclamation point on how hard it is to fly.

Human-powered flight is deuced difficult. Most attempts at it aren’t ornithopters; they’re just lightweight bicycles with big wings and a driver with big legs. They don’t get very far. The dirty secret of all this stuff is that human powered anything is woefully inefficient. A human being consumes a lot of energy to produce very little power. Nature has no opinion about whether you shovel coals into a furnace or hams into your face. Energy costs, big, and a human is a lousy dray horse.

But humans have minds. They invented all the stuff that made it possible for that feeble carcass, which is probably less feeble than most, to fly like a bird for a minute. Human beings are wonderful. We do what we put our minds to, eventually, generally. Shame we devote 90 percent of our mental horsepower to judging karaoke contests on teevee.

(Thanks to everyone’s favorite bird-brain in Seattle, Van der Leun, for sending that one along)

8 thoughts on “I Just Flew In From Holland, And Boy Are My Arms Tired”

  1. Shame we devote 90 percent of our mental horsepower to judging karaoke contests on teevee.

    You know, I come to BSBFB for the giggles, sometimes the laughs, always for the interesting “stuff” you present, but that sentence, right there in the here and now, sums up everything I’ve been thinking about our society for the past five or six years.

    Dude – I am so going to steal that line.

  4. Photoshop brilliance too.

    When as a kid you’re riding your bike and thinking how nice it would be if the damn thing flew, consider what happens when you climb a hill.

    You slow down, a lot.

    They flying guy has to do at least that much work (using his arms!) just to get that altitude increase, which is going to slow him down below flying speed.

    In addition, worse, he has to support his weight by throwing air downwards. The slower he goes, the faster he has to throw the air down, and energy loss depends on the square of this velocity. So if he goes half as fast, he spends four times as much energy throwing air downwards. This energy loss to lift is called induced drag. Uphills would be very fatal to our friend.

    Gliders, and human powered vehicles, have very very long wings so that a huge amount of air can be hurled downwards at a very small velocity, instead of a small amount of air at a huge velocity.

    The wing on this thing is not long, so its induced drag is very high.

    If you want to capture a bird indoors easily, poke him back into flight whenever he lands on something. Indoors he’ll be flying slowly, which means he’s losing huge amounts of energy to induced drag. In a couple minutes he’ll be exhausted and you can just scoop him up and put him outdoors.

    A bird is efficient and can’t handle low speed, though he can do flights to Florida easily.

    Our friend’s energy balance doesn’t make any sense.

  5. “Most attempts at it aren’t ornithopters; they’re just lightweight bicycles with big wings and a driver with big legs.”

    That’s why I don’t buy this guy’s claim. He may (possibly) have enough surface area in those large wings but I don’t think humans have the strength in their pectorals to power wings.

    Thus “most attempts… [are] lightweight bicycles”. Legs are much stronger than arms. Most people can kick a door open but not many can punch a door open.

  6. RH – no doubt about it being fake – just the way the film was cut and edited probably makes the case for it being faked with CGI. From a physics standpoint, there is nothing that says it COULDN’T be done, but it is unlikely and…I guess improbable. I saw something similar once on Mythbusters only it involved an explosion and surfers in Amsterdam or some Scandinavian country. Faking it can be done.

    The larger point, in my opinion, is that for just a second – one moment in time – you had to believe it was possible and what a thrill it would be. The skeptical side of my brain says “oh man, not another ‘Shopped video” but the whimsical side of my brain says “wouldn’t it be wonderful”.

  7. If you notice about the 1:00 minute mark the lines of a vehicle being driven across the grass; right in front of and directly in line with our flyer.

    Tow vehicle or coincidence?

    I don’t believe in THAT much coincidence.

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