Human powered flapping flight wont come out of gliding or ornithopters but out of the incremental exaggeration of adaptive winged, full crawl stroke, standing take off, figure-eighting of the arms to cover the full space possible around the body. Once wings are developed for the upper body this way, a set of wings based on this functionality can be made for the legs to allow four winged flight.

Development should start via aerodynamic juggling sleeves.

I have noticed while learning to juggle in still air, that the constant hand motion creates a vortex ring around the body, because you are pushing air up by catching, throwing and cycling your hands. It is an inefficient process though and could be optimized if semi-rigid aerodynamic sleeves were worn.

By filming the paths of the sleeve tips and incrementally shaping them so that they are as adaptive as possible and scoop the most air possible, by watching the video in slow motion and then adding material, an optimal vortex can be achieved. By then eventually losing the balls and simply designing the wings to support full windmilling of the arms rather than just cycling of the hands, an optimal wing shape can be achieved.

Adding weighted tips to the wings to achieve leverage would be a way to increase torque, as would adding energy storing gyroscopes at these weighted points at the ends of the wings.

All told, you may achieve human flapping flight through the judicious development of a pair of aerodynamic juggling sleeves.

I guess a midway step would be to use the juggling sleeves to keep those juggling handkerchiefs floating in the gusts of judiciously sculpted air above your scooping sleeves.
-- JesusHChrist, Jan 01 2016

// out of the incremental exaggeration of adaptive winged, full crawl stroke, standing take off, figure-eighting of the arms to cover the full space possible around the body //

It won't come out of that, either.

Humans don't have the skeletal or muscular characteristics imperative for flapping flight. The upper body muscles are too weak. The lower muscles - the legs - are poorly adapted in terms of articulaion.

All successful attempts at heavier-than-air human-powered flight have been based around bicycle-type energy conversion, using the leg muscles as the power source.

[-] for bad engineering and a total lack of thermokinetic reaction units.
-- 8th of 7, Jan 01 2016


Adding weighted tips to the wings...

While you could do that, as an accumulator of work, it still won't help much once that power has been used up, it has to be accumulated again.

Flight needs the get me off the ground impetus, but also the holy crap moments when something very big and solid gets in the wa
-- not_morrison_rm, Jan 02 2016


Bun for the shear absurd creativity.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 04 2016



random, halfbakery