A marvelous way to fly?
What - in the air for a minute and traveled less distance than he 'ran' getting up to speed in a few seconds?
The "Flying Dutchman" who enthralled world+dog earlier this week with a video of him flying through the wild blue yonder by flapping homemade wings has admitted that the entire airborne affair was but a hoax. And so was the name of the supposedly intrepid aviator: "Jarno Smeets" is in actuality a fictional character created by …
Even though I don't automatically believe' them, this from Wikipedia:
"Critical thinking has been described as “reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do. It has also been described as "thinking about thinking". ...... More recently, critical thinking has been described as "the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which uses reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria."
Oooh, look, a pink unicorn!
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.
"Space travel is bunk" -Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of
Britain, 1957, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik.
"Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody
will use it, ever." - Thomas Edison, 1889
So you've not heard of the Gossamer Condor/Albatross? What are your thoughts on men walking on the moon, BTW? Processors faster than 1MHz? Electronic calculators that don't use valves? Mechanical adding machines?
Just curious what year your knowledge of engineering stops. Sometime before 1977, but when...? ;)
No, it wasn't elaborate and it didn't look convincing. The guy wrote fiction on a blog for less than a year, and used special effects that, frankly, if he paid for, he should have gotten his money back, and suddenly every arm-chair physicist and aeronautical engineer with a YouTube account had to yell at everyone on the internet (or type with CAPS lock on) exclaiming that it was "So totally real you guys!"
Sometimes I wish the Earth would crash into the sun.
Well I, for one, am inspired. You might think of me as one of those sheeple but I get my inspiration from the internet. It is an interactive medium where I can browse my interests without being held prisoner by a remote control. What I got, when I was watching the video, is the equivalent of a magic show. And I didn't even have to pay the price of an admission.
No, the woman does not really hover but the guy did swallow the sword whole. Believe what you want to believe.
I am out buying small pieces of wood to build my own Ornithopter. What will you do?
I congratulate the guy for making an effective, fun and entertaining video. It may have fooled a couple of Guardian readers, but noone who studied a science beyond the age of 12. Any fule know humans can't power flight in that way for the same reason birds have proportionatly huge chest muscles. Look at a pidgeon - breast muscles bigger then your biceps.
Unless your breast muscles are the size of a car, you're not flying anywhere, not by flapping.
I love how everyone's suddenly saying. Of course I knew it was a hoax. Where were you guys when the original article came out. Humans can't power flight like small birds which flap to fly, pidgeon, black bird, etc. But human powered flight is very possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRyyKQQtYqg
So the trick would be to emulate a bird like an albatross. That can't flap its wings very well either. Its a soaring bird that rides the air currents. I'm sure you could could up with a pair of wings to act like that.
(Actually I think one year might be enough). First, background: in this article <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/09/23/the-first-ever-flight-of-a-pedal-powered-wing-flapping-vehicle/">http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/09/23/the-first-ever-flight-of-a-pedal-powered-wing-flapping-vehicle/</a> documents a successful human-powered ornithopter flight driven by a bicycle linkage. Human powered flight is using at best about 1.2 KW of power. So that is a reasonable minimum constraint. Let's use 3 KW as a reasonable minimum power-augmented system.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I looked this up: a 2400 watt-hour lithium battery (cost $3000) weighs about 40 lbs. I don't know if they are the right kind, but 750 watt servo motors weigh about 7 lbs. each, so four of them would be about 30 lbs. Assume a wing span area similar to that of an ultralight (but probably a different shape) I figure another four smaller servo motors, so add another 30 lbs. for those plus miscellaneous wiring, controls, sensors, etc. for a total weight of about 100 lbs. plus that of the rider.
I assume that the control systems are just an engineering and software question. There are some interesting physics challenges in the framework to prevent the guy whose arms are stretched out from having them bent backwards and ripped from their sockets. But the ability to build an ornithopter airframe that carries 300 lbs. of rider-plus-power is essentially proven.
So, bottom line - this is a reasonable high school or college physics or engineering class exercise. I hope to see successful prototypes within a year or two, and commercial versions in another year or two. The movie maker was smarter than he knew - he has single-handedly invented, or at least inspired, a new sport. Within a few years folks will have perfected these systems to the point where birdlike flare landings and wing folding systems will be available.
I think you'll find your wing loadings are off by about an order of magnitude. My back of a fag packet calculations based on the weight and wingspan of a bustard (because it was the bird that appeared to have the highest wing loading in the first table I found) suggests that to lift 300ib you'll need a wing span of about 100ft...
Most people don't get just how light birds are.