I don't know how useful this is, but it's certainly cool: Aviation history is made by 'flapper'

Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly — a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci...

The flapper, as it's affectionately known, sustained flight over about a third of a kilometre for 14 seconds at about 10:20 a.m. before being hit by a crosswind and almost flipping over, damaging the nose and front wheel on the runway at Downsview Park.

But the flight was long enough to prove DeLaurier's mechanical flapping-wing design for a manned, jet-boosted aircraft works. The successful test flight was longer than the first powered flight by aviation pioneers the Wright brothers in December 1903 that lasted 12 seconds over a windswept beach in North Carolina. Beating that record was enough for DeLaurier.

"It is a perfect day," he said after the flight. "If I have the big one now, I'll die happy."

It's unlikely we'll see commercial passenger ornithopters, but it would be fun to see this technology pass into the hobbyist realm...imagine the spectacle of a fleet (flock?) of home-built ornithopters at a weekend fly-in.

Posted by T.L. James on July 9, 2006 06:28 PM | TrackBack