If the concept behind a fish hook or an arrow point is that it goes in easy and it is difficult to pull out then the concept behind this invention is that it goes up easily and it is difficult to pull down. This would be a three dimensional air "hook". I dont have the design drawn out or modeled but just the general idea. It would be a spiraled propellor-spring that fans out when it is pulled and closes up when it is pushed. I dont know if you would make one really big one and try to pump it up and down with your legs like a giant pogo stick, or zillions of tiny small ones that you could microscopically attach to your flying suit so that it would only go up in the air and resist any downward movement. Or maybe the answer would be to stick right in the middle with just a few of these one-way propellors attached say to each joint on the body of a human-powered flying suit.
Hmm. I may not be explaining the structure of this thing well enough. It would be like a spiral aerodynamic umbrella. Or like a negative corkscrew undulating one-way propellor. Or like a three-dimentionally "barbed" air "hook". It would also be really adaptive and really tapered so that the edges were infinitely thin and floppy and would slice adaptively into the air and the core of the thing was teutoniumly solid and unfloppy.
Looking back on this I forgot to say that it would be a one-piece design with no moving parts -- adaptive design.-- JesusHChrist, Aug 06 2006 You mean like this? http://www.museosci.../vite_aerea_big.jpg [NotTheSharpestSpoon, Aug 06 2006] Yes [SharpestSpoon], like the Leonardo design, except not based on a wheel-berring-axle thing. Wheels are like Republicans because they show that you can pretend that friction doesn't exist -- and Wings and undulation and everything in nature except for wheels are like Democrats because they show that friction works best when it is spread out to every part of a system as evenly as possible. The Wright Brothers' patent was based on Democratic undulation and the Alexander Graham Bell workaround of that patent and almost every plane since has been based on Republican ailerons, which is why WWI and II happened and why modern planes are so big and so fast. If we would have stuck with the basic concept of the Wright Brothers undulatory design we would have optimized that design down to having man-powered adaptive undulatory flying people suits within a decade -- instead of having to have gone through two world wars and the rest of the twentieth century... is my wager-- JesusHChrist, Aug 06 2006 I know that I've seen this type of contraption before, an early failed attempt at flapping flight but I can't find a picture anywhere. It looked like a semi rigid umbrella with its pole attached to a motor, (steam I think), that would raise an lower rapidly.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 06 2006 Yeah, that was the picture I was looking for too. The guy just sort of bounced up and down for awhile. Seems like it would have worked if he (the guy in the picture) had a longer pole or a smaller, faster moving umbrella.-- NotTheSharpestSpoon, Aug 06 2006 random, halfbakery