Three years of Icarus Cup!

[@edmaralino]

Really nice video. Keep up the good work!

[@joshtantum4276]

absolutely insane transition at 1:20

[@pilotpatty]

Next year, may the wind boweth down and not across the runway. Great video!

[@yaseen157]

Fingers crossed for that!🤞

[@oscarchan3730]

Sheeeeeesh

[@fabianb4893]

This shows how economically bad it is to fly. If you apply the same amount of power for the same time on a regular bike you would probably end up passing twice the distance.

[@spayum2]

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.

[@fabianb4893]

@@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 ;)

[@yaseen157]

@@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"

[@bryanlallen]

@@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? 🤔

[@yaseen157]

​@@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