Okay, not really.
I mean it's not exactly lighter than air.
It's also not really a bicycle.
Well sort of.
Maybe.
The thing is, because of it's uh, lightness, you can't really use it on road.
Okay Mr. Flat Tire, just what the hell are you talking 'bout?
Of course I'm talking of human powered flight.
I don't know why I though of this, it just sort of popped into my head.
Things have a habit of doing that don't you know.
Popping into my head I mean.
So anyways one day way back when, in another life, I was sitting around watching like PBS or something cause Law & Order wasn't invented yet.
I came across this show about some high faluting science types who were working on human powered flight.
Some folks at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology to be exact.
I mean if that's not a bunch of high faluting science types, I don't know what is. So anyways, by this time, human powered flight was not that much of a big deal for the Gossamer Albatross had already crossed the English Channel.
Now these high faluting MIT folks figured weil, we can do better than that!
Well, okay I don't know what they were thinking but they did do better than that.
It seems they wanted to recreate the mythical flight of Daedalus.
If you remember, Daedalus was some Greek person who was banished to some island with his son, but he made some wings out of wax to escape but his son flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and well, you get the idea.
Daedalus wasn't very happy after that.
Anyways, they built this pedal powered craft called, you guess it!
Daedalus!
The phrase I thought of was "pedaling like your life depended on it."
I mean it's not like you can take a break or coast or something.
Not like there's a 7-11 where you can stop and get a cream soda or Hawaiian energy drink.
There's a better video of the Daedalus flight somewhere out there, I just couldn't find it, that gives a bit more details on that world record flight.
This was where I first(and possibly the last) heard the word dihedral and how it affected airplanes and stuff and I think it's the first time I ever heard of carbon fibre too.
It's also the first time I ever heard of cycling for something other than well, cycling.
Pretty impressive stuff.
Okay, well like I said it just popped into my head, and now it popped into yours, and now it can pop right back out.
Of my head I mean.
5 comments:
I think that I will stick with the ferry on my trips to France......!
-Trevor
Very interesting. I remember seeing the Gossamer Albatross on the news at the time of the crossing but I had never heard of the Daedalus.
It looks like these featherweight aircraft are almost impossible to control if the conditions aren't perfect.
All in our lifetimes...
I will always remember the Daedalus 88 for its ending: crashing 7 meters from the beach (officially) after the tail boom broke. You pedal all that way, then have to swim the last 25 feet. Also, that it used two beveled gears and a torque tube to transmit power, instead of a chain or cable (like previous human powered planes).
Trevor, just think though, how impressed your friends would be!
RTP, if I remember correctly the Daedalus flight was held up for precisely that: perfect weather.
The crash was caused by the wind picking up.
Steve A., amazing ain't it.
JRA, yeah, the engineering part was pretty cool expecially those long carbon fibre tubes.
The ending was pretty sad, the write up says the tail boom broke, but all I remember was the wing spar snapping when the "pilot" tried to execute a turn.
I wonder why they never tried again.
Oh and if you search youtube, there's a video of Daedalus 87, the back up vehicle, which is on display in Dulles International.
I forgot to add it in.
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