FLYING BY MUSCLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 December 1938, Page 7

FLYING BY MUSCLES

HUMAN FLIGHT WITH WINGS. EXPERIMENTS IN ITALY. A group of Italian engineers and aviation enthusiasts, convinced the legend of Icarus some day will become a reality, is trying to develop an apparatus which will enable man to fly with his own muscular power. Next spring the Institute of Human Muscular Flight, which records and •analyses the experiments of the group, will hold a derby to check up on recent progress. Prizes of from £lO to £5O will be offered for the most successful models and actual flights, if any (says the "Christian Science Monitor"). The Royal Italian Aeronautical Union has offered a permanent prize of £l,OOO for the Italian who develops a practical apparatus. The city of Turin has added £lOO and the institute hopes to augment this by popular subscription. Experience with gliders has shown that a motorless plane may be kept aloft for extended periods by skilful manoeuvering to take advantage of air currents. A “cycleplane” invented by an ItaloAmerican, Enea Bossi, employee of a Philadelphia airplane factory, has made flights lasting more than a minute. The plane resembles an ordinary cabin glider with (he addition of two propellers driven by a geared apparatus which (lie pilot operates with his feet like a bicycle. The Italian experiments, however, are based on the idea that rnusculai flight must discard the aeroplane type of construction, with fixed wings and propellers. It is to heavy, they say, and unadapted to the limitation of human strength. STUDY OF BIRDS. The muscle flyers learn their lesson from Nature, by watching the flight of birds and insects. They analyse the flying of domesticated pigeons, measuring their horse-power and comparing it weight for weight with that produced by the average man. Cue experimenter. Colonel Alberto Beltica. is working on a set of wings weighing about 55 pounds, which he believes may be made to support in the air a man weighing 150 pounds for indefinite periods.

In this apparatus the wings would be hinged by a resilient substance which would permit them to move like the wings of a bird. The pilot would be suspended below in a kind of trapeze seat, swinging himself to and fro by pulling on ropes attached to the undersides of the wings.

The pilot's swinging motions would provide the motive power to actuate the wings. Colonel Bettica believes in this way the flyer would be able 1 to direct his flight from one favourable air current to another, controlling his course and at the same time conserving his energy. His big problem is howto get his winged man into the air in the first place.