Thank you! Yes, it turns out a lot of the sport involves some quite unglamorous walking and waiting. The Aerocycles fly for longer, but naturally this makes them harder to ground handle in a timely manner. Will try to add some highlights to the channel soon :)

Thank you! We're going to keep improving and hopefully inspire more UK universities to follow and compete with us

We hope to live to their legacy! And yes, well spotted 😉😉

Thanks!! We're doing what we can 😅

Hi, I'm certain we caught it on camera during one of the livestreams, but I can't find the right timestamp for some reason. We'll let you know if we find it!

Thanks. I thought it was on Thurs morning but I can't even find that livestream.

These planes are not efficient at all by the standards of human powered flight. In another video one of the teams explains that they require 350-380 watts to maintain level flight. Gossamer Albatross (the first human powered aircraft to fly across the English Channel) only required 300 watts, and MIT Daedalus (which set the record for the longest human powered flight ever, over 70 miles) only required about 250.

@@spayum2 it is actually very simple: any road cyclist knows that the majority of power loss goes into air drag. This is an exponential function so it even increases the faster you go. Now this leads to the thought that for a power efficient vehicle you would want to reduce the front surface of the vehicle as much as possible. Since any flying device needs wings in addition to the passengers cabin it will allways have a larger front surface then a comperable land vehicle which will only consist of the cabin. Now you only need to reduce the friction of the tires ( large thin tires with high pressure) aaaaaand here we go the romans knew it already if you want to move efficiently you gotta have the best roads ;)

@@fabianb4893 @spayum2 you're both right, but it's a little more complicated why these planes are the way they are. A bike is more efficient for the power invested, and these planes are not the most "efficient" HPAs (if the efficiency metric you care about is energy invested for distance travelled). My understanding of the reason why, is that Aerocycle and SUHPA aircraft have higher design cruise speeds and much shorter wingspans than the Albatross or Daedalus. The annual Icarus cup competition held in the UK (where Aerocycle and SUHPA regularly compete) contains not only endurance and range categories, but speed and slalom etc. and so the planes aren't always necessarily designed with endurance/range as the top priority. Why design a plane that can fly 115 km, if you want to win at a competition where the max distance you could be asked to fly is 10 km? In that respect, "efficiency" of a design is not as easy to define as "my plane flies further so it's better"

@@yaseen157C’mon. Monarch, Bionic Bat, and Musculair all had equivalent or shorter wingspans. Musculair did its prize flights on pure human power (no energy storage.) Bionic Bat also did longer flights on human-power only (ask me how I know.) Those are airplanes from the 1980s. Uh, guys? 🤔

​@@bryanlallenI'll bite and ask you how you know. But I'm telling you now, making these isn't as simple as you think it is for us - we're university students with no academic guidance on the project, and we make do with sub-optimal structures recycled from previous projects because we simply can't afford to craft our designs from scratch. For ~£8k it does a hell of a lot better than nothing when most designs are easily £30k and up

Fingers crossed for that!🤞

😐

While it's possible to arrange the wings in biplane form to reduce span for the same lift, the mutual interference between each wing plane causes additional "interference" drag. Sure it *could* result in a lighter structure, but the drag penalty makes it much harder for a pilot to sustain the required power (humans find it exponentially harder to maintain a given level of cycling power output). The trade-off for weight saving isn't worth it!

@@SUHPA Thank you. Can I see your structural calculations for the Lazarus MkII. thanks

You’re describing the MIT Chrysalis. Well, and the MIT BURD, but that one was trash. Look up Chrysalis.

Done decades ago. We built a pedal-blimp for Gallagher called “White Dwarf.” Longest flight was over eight hours, from Thermal to Brawley in California, in 1985.

About 38kg! This is still relatively heavy as far as these types of planes go, so we're looking to make it lighter in future :)

this is fine, but too much flex in elevators

The title says human powered aircraft. That means no engine. Ask your peter whatever to explain to you what is "human powered" aircraft.

The wings have spars made of carbon fiber. We manufacture ribs made of high density blue foam and reinforced with balsa wood, and space them out evenly along the spar. Wedge-shape lengths of balsa wood are used to create a constant trailing edge. The wing leading edge is covered in heat-molded depron foam, and the rest of the surface is skinned with Mylar and heat shrunk. The carbon fiber spars are only 4 metres in length, so we join wing sections together using friction fit square aluminium bars.

@@SUHPA thank you for information

Hi, we use FX-76-MP-140 for the main constant chord sections, and the wingtip aerofoil is DAE-31. Not sure what the tail is exactly, but it's one of the standard NACA 00xx aerofoils

yes

Unfortunately, that was me! Yes it is bad practice, yes I don't recommend doing what I did, and yes I won't do it again. In the moment I assure you I was watching the propeller (it looks worse from this angle because you can't see how far to the side I was. Safety comes first and I have learned :)

LOL