Is It Possible To Fly Like A Bird? [4K] | When Dreams Take Flight | Spark

[Music] [Music] since the dawn of time man has looked to the skies and imagined soaring like a bird [Music] for birds the act of flying is intrinsic [Music] but for man the same action is encumbered fraught with difficulty and well seemingly impossible [Music] [Music] todd reichert is an engineering student at the university of toronto he studies flapping wing to flight as part of his thesis todd plans to build a human-powered ornithopter a plane that flies by flapping its wings todd had some early aspirations of flying to visit his uh his friends that lived two or three blocks away and he had he had the vision of fly actually flying there with some wings on his on his arms todd is certainly not the first person to imagine this [Music] while icarus existed in myth alone many intrepid souls have set their sights on flying like a bird in the sky under their own power to date none have succeeded so what makes todd think he can change [Music] that todd he's got a drive it's an obsessive drive for pretty much anything that he's working on he's a perfectionist everything has to be a hundred percent from the beginning he knew that this was something that hadn't been done before and it would be really big and could be really exciting would be a huge challenge are you willing to make ultimate sacrifices not every one of these priorities has been successful a lot of them ended because somebody had a crash and didn't make it [Music] if todd achieves this dangerous and elusive goal he will go down in history we're on our way to denver for a conference on microarray vehicles and flapping wings in the car driving across the country and sort of playing around with some of the recent computer simulations that i'd written and so we tried you know simulating all let's see if we can you know what would happen try to build a human-powered ornithopter so let's make the wings this big you know make it flap see what happens um and after about an hour we sort of yeah came to the realization that we had something there that you know if we can build a plane that is under 100 pounds that has you know a wingspan of about 30 meters and if the wings can move in in this motion it will fly and uh so knowing that for the first time in history we we knew that it was possible we didn't think that it was possible we knew we could do it right from the get-go it was a human-powered flapping wing aircraft and it was pretty fantastical i thought that todd at the very least would take this further than it ever had been taken before the papers the calculations said it was just possible just barely you want to check it [Music] initially having conceived of the idea in 2006 todd and cameron spent the next two years mapping out their plans and beginning the initial phases of development for their aircraft ready to put theory into action they hand picked a team of fellow engineering students and drove from their lab downtown to a glider club north of the city to begin construction [Music] starting this project i knew i was going to be sacrificing many other elements of my life for the next four years to dedicate to this so it's a trade-off with a comprehensive task list including 800 hours of sanding construction of 25 carbon fiber tubes 240 circular biscuits and 102 perfectly shaped wing ribs todd and the team have allowed themselves only a finite period of time for building this means with everything going according to plan the team will have to work at least 14 hours a day to meet their goals at this point we have three and a half months left and then we need to fly and we can't take three weeks going down a significantly wrong path and that's going to be the most difficult part everything essentially has to be as close to perfect as physically possible [Music] through the whole project we're concerned about weight weight is the enemy and we try to minimize it any way possible how much difference is that seven grams gonna make not that much but once you obsess over something you do that seven grams a hundred times on all these different components now all of a sudden you've made a difference if there's one day where you paying attention to weight and you slopped on extra glue that glue's never coming off that component will always be too heavy so you need to obsess every day [Music] leonardo da vinci was this epitome of the renaissance man [Music] many people kind of tie him in with the idea of the ornithopter [Music] [Applause] [Music] the ornithopter was one that he had devised that was you know he was learning from nature he was looking at bats he was looking at how their wings are structured and how their wings move and he was trying to recreate that he didn't actually build any models a lot of the stuff that he sketched he didn't necessarily build but he had quite a few different plans for helicopters and ornithopters the knowledge aerodynamics at the time was essentially zero you need to travel ridiculously slow to travel slowly you have to have a huge wing area and you have to have a very very light aircraft so da vinci uh davinci's aircraft was simply too small yeah it would have to be i mean roughly seven or eight times larger when i was a kid like a high school kid i built model airplanes later on i met a fellow engineer named jeremy harris and jerry had a dream of making an ornithopter that could be engine powered and could carry a pilot and he had done some initial calculations even built a wind tunnel in his basement and we thought that this would be a fairly simple thing to address after all it hadn't really been seriously looked at for decades and we had all these powerful tools you know our fine engineering educations our hand calculators and we thought we thought we could take care of this in short order well it turned out we had a tiger by the tail this was really difficult the crucial step besides the calculations of wind tunnel tests was a quarter scale radio controlled engine powered model that we called mr bill first time we went out it splattered itself all along along the hill and we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us mr bill is a character of perpetual ill fortune basically we gather up the pieces and figure out what went wrong what could we do next each passing year we got a little better we understood the physics a little better and we kept ratcheting up the technology until finally in 1991 september the 4th [Music] [Music] wow [Music] high on the success of mr bill dr delaurier and jerry immediately started working on a full-sized engine-powered piloted ornithopter when the great flapper achieved flight 15 years after mr bill's epic journey dr delaurier had fulfilled his dream almost with an injun-powered ornithopter you could imagine this having some development potential having said that still the original dream this age-old dream of a human-powered ornithopter persisted and then todd came along and wanted to come to grips with it [Music] initially the team believed that rowing the plane would be the best mode of propelling it but as they worked to figure out the mechanics of that plan they realized it would need to be moved with leg strength alone [Music] next up was to find a pilot needed someone with low body weight the strength and endurance of an olympic athlete in combination with an understanding of flight their project and a willingness to undertake the potential danger of this endeavor the idea is just to cut as much weight as possible you can cut 20 percent of my weight i mean that's 15 of the total weight of the aircraft because the pilot makes up such a huge percentage of the total weight so the weight that i'll be trying to lose is weight from my arms or visceral fat the kind of layers of fat that you have in between your organs to actually fly the ornithopter todd will be required to push forward in a rowing motion using only his legs to achieve the desired flapping [Music] so the goal is to be able to produce a leg press of four to five hundred pounds on a typical leg press machine it's normally at about 45 degree angle so it'd be like loading that with with seven or eight hundred pounds [Music] the power that todd would have to produce we would basically look at power curves for you know olympic growers output and it's it's up there that's why we can only do it for 20 seconds is because it is a superhuman effort [Music] otto lillianthal a pioneer of human aviation was born in germany in 1848 before his 20th birthday he had started to study the physical basics of human-powered flight over 2000 experimental glides found him coined the glider king and although he never built an ornithopter he believed flapping flight to be the way of the future [Music] lillianthal's major contribution was he made successful repeated controlled glides he did a lot of aeronautical testing like actually you know building a test wing putting it on some sort of spinning device so we could get it moving through the air and measuring the forces on it he also clearly demonstrated to the world that heavier-than-air flight is possible he was kind of on the wrong path with regard to the stability and control of his gliders the control as far as he was concerned was provided by moving your body around relative to the glider itself shifting the center of gravity to make it go one way or make it go another that works okay for small gliders but if you get toppled by a gust of wind you don't have the control authority to pull out of it [Music] uh [Music] [Music] foreign otto lilianthal died the next day from injuries sustained in his accident [Music] almost three months into their work and weeks behind schedule the intensive agenda is becoming difficult to maintain and the workload greater than they had initially anticipated todd is still pulling double duty leading the group and training to be the pilot i guess five or six weeks before the end of the summer that's our deadline after that uh some people go back to school some people are off but at jobs essentially like that's our window if we don't hit it that's it the other major obstacle is just is the mindset being able to stay focused enough while maybe not quite sleeping enough stay motivated i mean you're working and living together with a group you need to be positive that can sometimes be a challenge right now it's really crunch time it's really just working late nights and getting as much stuff as we can done during the week and then whatever pushes over onto the weekends i mean we're trying to do something that's never been done before we don't expect to be able to do it by working nine to five so according to their original schedule they were supposed to be doing test flights by now instead productivity seems to be slipping and in its place tensions rising [Music] when there was a team crisis i think that was the time where it was like oh i don't know if we have the resources we need now to be able to do this todd's comes up to me oh he just looks so beaten down you look so sad i'm thinking oh cow what happened two weeks ago the somewhat actually i think i'm i think i'm being miked here maybe i shouldn't talk too bad about the team we lost a few members of the team there's five people that quit it was pretty big shock it's been really weird there was sort of like a kind of clique within the team and it just started building and they weren't motivated and weren't having fun and it's tough like i just dreaded coming in and trying to gather people's spirits sometimes you have someone who leaves the team behind like they are so driven and focused and hard and fast that you know this is all there is um and you know todd does that sometimes he says dr d the project's over i guess i i should have start disassembling things and start tidying up and and pretty much uh put an end to it with two-thirds of the team having abandoned the project todd and cameron found themselves adrift through an interesting turn of events things quickly shifted it was supposed to be a 10-day internship and then after that i was supposed to go to vancouver to do my math 12 course this high school student that came out from vancouver he just wanted to kind of come out and check it out for a week him and his dad are out like this high school student builds like model ornithopters in his basement like and and the dad does woodworking on like multi-billion dollar yachts so both of them like know how to build stuff okay what's better for carson stay here and work on the ornithopter the rest of the summer or go back to vancouver and do his his summer school math course [Music] i have nowhere near the math or the physics that they have so i was picking things up as i was working [Music] at first i was just building small parts and then by the end i was designing the wingtips they provided you know a hell of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of effort and a huge amount of motivation and the two of them are absolutely unreal like they have basically saved this project by being here i've worked on a lot of projects a lot of high profile projects but the the type of chemistry that is required on some of these high-paced projects is very important and i would say during that last month and a half where basically it was todd cameron carson and myself working together i have yet to have the type of chemistry and good working environment that the four of us shared it gets pretty intense to try to build a whole aircraft in one summer we're figuring out ways of not needing as many people so something that would take three people we could do with one so the working suddenly got very efficient for that last month and i said todd if you carry on with this i'll come up and help you too okay to make a project like this work you have to have a good team you have to have a team that's totally committed and we were totally committed we were doing sometimes 15 or 16 hour days just going home to sleep eating lunch while we were working breakfast dinner staying until two or three in the morning now it's awesome like at any given moment like we are working and i would rather and i would not want to be doing anything else finally this is now the summer i had dreamed of oh this one's gonna be awesome as if the rest were not awesome [Music] [Music] [Music] seven three nine ten eleven [Music] can you feel the wind on it do you pull it out that door immediately it just gets taken it'd be easy to get to let it slip and hit a barn door [Music] i guess it's sort of big okay go ahead [Music] it's the wingspan of a 737 and it weighs just as much as one seat on the 737 like it's just seeing something this big is the first time we've been able to really take in the size and it's just awesome like i love looking at the shape just looking at how straight the lines are you know how much effort has been been put into making this perfect and just to see it coming together and everything fitting is it's beautiful oh what a sweet shape wow [Music] eve rousseau a craftsman by trade lives in a small town in western france he has always been passionate about flying [Music] the prepetition material [Music] revelation [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] eve's desire to experience free flying drove him to look to the birds for inspiration [Music] [Music] [Music] in the early 1990s guided only by his senses and experience he set out to build a human-powered ornithopter m [Music] um foreign [Music] bianco [Applause] [Music] [Music] on eve's 213th flight due to a miscommunication about the speed of the tow vehicle eve found himself pulled rapidly into the air faster than he had anticipated [Music] faster than was safe with no time to think about releasing his toe his ornithopter's wings collapsed [Music] the accident resulted in him becoming paraplegic foreign [Music] we're gonna need one of those finally three months later than they'd originally planned the team assembled their ornithopter for the first time on a cold october morning the perfect morning is just dead calm being able to get out here before the sun rises have the aircraft assembled on the runway ready to go you know before we see that sliver of sun and when the sun starts to come up then we've got enough light to start testing the ideal condition was absolutely zero wind you know if you could see anything moving if you could see the trees moving if you could see a flag moving then there was way too much wind with human powered aircraft you don't fly any higher than you're willing to fall because the aircraft is essentially every part is almost about to break at all times everything essentially has to be as close to perfect as is physically possible uh if something is you know 98 uh there's a good chance it's not gonna work [Music] we wanted to maximize safety and take every precaution because we have only one todd and we have only one airplane and we don't have a lot of resources to fix either yeah so again [Music] we'll just pull it way back the towing it up is something that we basically accepted almost from the very beginning the biggest problem is always getting it off the ground because basically ornithopters have so many big loads imposed by the flapping wings that if those loads connect to the ground it shakes the rest of the airplane apart we're gonna get a toe into the air and then even if you don't flap like you'll glide for a certain amount the thing will be to show that we're not just on an extended glide that we're actually maintaining level flight uh for an extended period of time the distance doesn't have to be exactly it's not like 50 meters or 100 meters is just you know it's like the wright brothers they're they'll just do it for some distance there definitely was the possibility of getting kited up too high and then something happening and then coming straight down i would be terrified i think it would be uh a really scary experience i'm sure his adrenaline is always pumping like crazy okay wingrunner thank you [Music] they got black [Music] [Music] wow you're up okay you're doing good you're doing good that's a crap [Music] [Music] robert's ready at the line [Music] it's okay [Music] having a little glide does not mean that it's going to work the calculations still said it's borderline that glide yes it meant we can proceed to the next step at that point but yeah focus we got good wind still uh so the wind is definitely going this way so let's take it back to that side and do our all our runs this way during october they assembled the ornithopter on a number of mornings each time they were able to achieve liftoff their glides got longer and they got more confident but flapping still seemed elusive and actual flight almost an impossibility [Music] really that's ridiculous that's good everybody ready okay you're loose [Music] oh [ __ ] [Music] wow he's out what's up bro robert's running at [Music] wow what happened there [Music] [Music] it all came apart at the same time so i don't know it's hard to know what happened first we're gonna have to figure it out [Music] so i started a second stroke and realized that i didn't have control i was trying to steer left wasn't going left at all and then was trying to pull up for the flare and it wasn't wasn't pulling up at all so uh yeah so the control was totally out okay so james i'm going to take this well the important thing first of all and foremost is that todd is okay we're near the end of the flying season so uh uh there's very few days left that could be suitable for testing so it's tough because we came in today really thinking that we had you know a vehicle that could do it um i'm not sure what happened on this something's happened um a design flaw that has to be discovered and fixed but uh in the meantime it's kind of a bummer type day we've just put in hundreds like thousands of hours and where do you start over there was basically this massive shudder in the fairing and i remember thinking like how the [ __ ] did the fairing break yeah yeah that's i i saw the fairing drop i don't think it's repairable this is not repairable [Music] with the ornithopter damaged beyond repair and cold weather closing in the team shut things down for the winter [Music] [Music] the secret of flight program 13 modern problems in flight your host is dr alexander lippisch come on come on come on come on dr alexander lipich was a german aerodynamicist who designed more than 50 aircraft and received more than 50 patents before his death in 1976. you see a mechanical bronze and well when you look at it the basic system of flying is here the same system as the bird has it the inner part of the ring gives a lift and the outer part of the ring propels this little aircraft model now i just push one of the connecting rods then the rings go up and down bearings are all made from small glass beads so they have practically no friction you see now i can let it go and it flies nicely around like a tamed world in the 1920s lippitch attempted to realize sustained flight in a human-powered ornithopter [Music] while there is literature that supports the fact that he achieved powered glides there is no data and no footage of these attempts so it's impossible to know for sure lippitch moved on from flapping flight to become a maverick in aeronautics design and technology [Music] after an uneasy winter of reflection todd's interest in his flapping wing machine had not wavered and his resolve to finish what he started was stronger than ever he had configured new calculations to address the flaw in his first design and was ready to put it to the test over the fall we had learned so much more and todd's code had changed so much it very much was a second iteration aircraft first we could make the aircraft lighter going through a second iteration there's a lot of things that we had to rush that were heavier we know where we could cut down weight i mean 94 pounds is pretty light for an aircraft but we can do better it was you know the second coming of what we had conceived and a lot of further thought had gone into it when my dad and i came out from vancouver and we got to tottenham for the first time in about nine months we just immediately got back into the rhythm that we had last year it was like we picked up right from where we left off we just kept building testing like testing individual components refining everything we believe uh todd's calculations were right so i mean we put a lot of pressure on him and as he saw the project coming closer to the point of completion the margin of errors were just coming together like we were at the brink of the materials uh breaking we were at the edge of todd's endurance everything had to work perfectly a human can only put out so much power so we want to minimize the amount of prior power that it takes to fly and the power required is the weight of the aircraft times the velocity that it's flying at divided by what we call the lift drag ratio times the propulsive efficiency so to minimize the power our aircraft needs to be as light as possible we need to minimize the weight and we would pay you know huge amounts in terms of time or money to find ways to make components lighter but really the fastest way the easiest way the cheapest way to drop weight from the aircraft is to drop it from the pilot so we're looking at five weeks left and i am weighing about 172 trying to lose about three or four pounds a week for the next five weeks the the trainer that i was working with also devised a diet plan and a workout schedule that would allow me to do that it was eating incredibly incredibly healthy like so many vegetables i ate so much broccoli like just pounding hordes of broccoli i was doing things to boost your metabolism like you know fish oil pills lots of lots of oils certain types of fatty acids we were adjusting the airplane to fit todd's physique like as he was losing weight we were shifting things on the airplane he needed to get those 60-70 grams off the furthest point away from the center of gravity so he could lose another two pounds last night he came to me said or this morning around four o'clock when he when we got together he said i did it 156 he got down another two pounds so what we did yesterday just the balance was it was perfect [Music] so over the course of the last month i dropped about 20 pounds i weigh one and a half times the weight of the aircraft [Music] now we're already down a certain path you know we've already built the plane to fly like this there's not really any going back the calculations show that maybe it'll still work but it's going to be really close ever hopeful about the possibility of success todd felt it important to comprehensively document their flight attempts using a gps system video cameras and other data recording devices additionally he asked jack humphries a representative from the fai the federation aeronautic international to observe their work in the hopes there would be something exciting to report basically my function was to make sure that nobody's making it up and that the airplane was maintaining its height maintaining its speed and the only qualification people could have as it could might have been a power glide and it represents probably one of the last great frontiers of aviation [Music] as the prospect of a record flight became more likely and i think that morning on the 2nd of august there was a sense of anticipation [Music] okay [Music] [Music] [Music] please [Music] the aircraft is just so beautiful and the way it performed with such grace was almost beyond words to describe i just thank god i live long enough to see this dream realized [Music] oh [Music] it was just a surreal experience we could run alongside and that was happening it was like usually i don't get tired and i'm getting really tired this is incredible [Music] to think you know wow this just went so much further than it ever has before like we're there [Music] wow [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] if you have a dream and you put your heart into it and you get together with even if it's a small group you can accomplish anything holy crap are your legs they're sore oh where's my mother [Music] airplane good that's not a sustained fight i don't know what it is but wait it's not over yet todd and cameron have set their sights on trying to break the world speed record for a human-powered vehicle on a bike they have designed and yes todd will ride it [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Spark

Views: 179,322

Keywords: Aerospace engineering, Aspirations, Aviation history, Construction, Dream to reality, Engineering advancements, Evolution of aviation, Groundbreaking, Guinness World Record, Heart's desire, Human achievement, Human aspiration, Human ingenuity, Innovation, Journey to the skies, Man's oldest dream, Pioneering, Spark, Sustainable transportation, University of Toronto

Id: AjFz-FTT0PM

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022