Developer Comment by Mark Colwell on March 21, 2012 at 7:37am

The wings appear to be real, power assist is feasible, and I believe he actually flew.

His bird machine is powered primarily with 2 geared down 3 kw motors and set of 4, 6s 6000 mAh battery power pack.

Human powers flight control surfaces (primary feathers) with arm muscles,  gliding requires little human effort.

With thermal hunting vario assist and with flexible organic solar film wing skins to charge system,  human power assisted flight could be unlimited....

If its not real someone will improve his system and do it. maybe a new group at DIYDrones will write APM 3.0 B1RD Wing controller!  I would love to fly it at Torrey Pines.

Developer Comment by Mark Colwell on March 21, 2012 at 7:42am

Elliston,

I believe it is just a CAD input error as the test fixture and prototype wings have all 3 wires.

Comment by Mauricio on March 21, 2012 at 7:45am

Totally fake:

-side camera man is not present in first camera.

-Look at his legs when side camera is recording.... And look at the kite type tail of his flying machine totally down in the frist third of the fligth and the rising up....

 

Comment by John Hestness on March 21, 2012 at 7:59am

I am not sure if this is for real or not, but even if it is fake I think in theory it may be possible because efficiently flying like a bird has already been hacked. Look up the Festo smart bird if you have not seen it. What a great time to be alive and have a crazy discussion like this one!

Comment by Ellison Chan on March 21, 2012 at 8:01am

Mark my point is that at the design stage, he had no clue that ESC connect to motors with 3 wires, it indicates to me that he did not have have a good grasp of the engineering.  Imagine building a quad, and not knowing in advanced how many wires go to the motors?

Comment by Ellison Chan on March 21, 2012 at 8:05am

Yes, this is so close to the cusp of being realistic, that someone is bound to do it in the near future.

I've been subscribing to this channel for a while now, and he does build small scale BLDC motor ornithopers.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BZH07614

His designs are similar in principal to what Smeet claims to have done.

Comment by José "Kala" on March 21, 2012 at 8:44am

I'd like this would be true... I am a little bit tired about CG and magics... It would be a great a shinny news.

Developer Comment by John Arne Birkeland on March 21, 2012 at 9:21am

I find it interesting that after putting all that time, money and energy into designing and building the rig. They decided to use a VHS/Hi8 camcorders from the early 90's with no image stabilization (judging from the quality) to record the close-up side shot while documenting the first flight..

Comment by Stephen Carlson on March 21, 2012 at 9:31am

I wish the video was real. The moment I saw it I posted it to about 5 friends in pure joy, but then, on further reading and rethinking what I saw, I've retracted my shares of the video.

However, here is a fairly detailed design study of the same idea. The Project Falcon:

http://www.dcgeorge.com/ProjectFalcon.html

Project Falcon

Developer Comment by jasonshort on March 21, 2012 at 10:52am

@jasonshort   most commentors on wired, techcrunch and here are not gullible. only the journalists are taken by the story.

No one is talking about the wing loading. how is this guy "Flapping"? That''s MASSIVE amounts of force to lift 180 pounds up and down like it was nothing. 

Not to mention the lack of a Yaw control system...

I would love to see the Mythbusters actually make this, but they seem just as gullible as wired!!!

http://www.tested.com/articles/43440-thoughts-on-the-mechanics-of-a...

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