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Dead Simple Human Powered Airplane (2013)

by pearkes on 9/15/14, 3:56 PM with 18 comments

  • by pearkes on 9/15/14, 6:30 PM

    My old roommate just emailed me about this, he and his girlfriend are both working on the project. One thing they noted:

    > The project is getting kicked out of our current building in November. We are looking for a new home for a few months. Somewhere in the south bay. Light industrial facility would be great but some office space with some large open areas (former cube farm) would work too. An aircraft hanger would be awesome....but we are not holding our breath....any decent space will do. Please get in touch if you have such a space / know someone / can pull some strings :).

    They are also having a 'Friends don't let friends build alone' day in Mountain View in early october. Email me (profile) and I'll forward it along if you're interested!

  • by nsedlet on 9/15/14, 8:32 PM

    Also, if you haven't heard of it, there are a few teams working on human-powered helicopters. In 2013, one of them became the first to win the Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Prize, which no team had been able to do for 33 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_I._Sikorsky_Human_Powered_...

    To win the prize, the craft had to fly for 60 seconds, achieve an altitude of 10 meters, and stay within a limited horizontal area.

  • by lotharbot on 9/15/14, 7:44 PM

    I'm wondering how this compares to other human-powered aircraft like the Gossamer Albatross (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossamer_Albatross -- crossed the English Channel in 1979 in just under 3 hours). IIRC the Gossamer Albatross had a similarly simple twisted bike chain transmission and some of the other simple features here.

  • by rll on 9/15/14, 6:40 PM

    A plane with "Dead" in its name seems like a bad choice.

  • by ErikRogneby on 9/15/14, 8:08 PM

    The first thing that popped in to my mind when I read the post title was a paper airplane.

  • by bkeroack on 9/15/14, 8:12 PM

    This seems really cool, but I'm not sure I would ever go above ~50 feet in altitude with it. It's a little scary that a leg cramp could cause me to plummet hundreds of feet to my death.

  • by vegancap on 9/15/14, 7:16 PM

    Is it bad that I imagined 350 people in a 747-400 all peddling on bikes?