Does it have to do with insufficient lift or just not practical?
In: Physics
the flapping isn’t just an up and down movement it has a loop part to it as well the size of muscles to control the push of the loop is massive which is why there is a maximum size for flying birds.
Flapping motion is not enough to overcome the force of gravity. Human bodies would have to be made completely out of muscles for that to happen – we are too heavy, our “wings” are too short, and we weigh too much.
Birds have light frames and hollow bones, as well as air sacs which make them lighter. The forces that drive their bodies upwards would therefore overcome the downward force created by their weight.
Tldr: human bodies are simply not designed for flying via flapping motion
Our arms have no significant surface to push air with. You need to be much lighter. Have wide wide arms that resemble wings to shove air downwords. Most likely hollow bones to help with the density, and you would need to be stronger. Just in general no wings means no fly
If you scaled a bird up to the size of a human it’d be pretty much all chest muscles which are used to flap the wings. Humans just aren’t strong enough.
Bone density (birds are frail as fuck as a cost of flight), muscle distribution, inverse square law (bigger things have less surface area to volume) screws us over, muscle distribution, hand shape (grab some giant cardboard and you won’t fly, but you’ll be closer), and probably a lot of other stuff.
We don’t have the chest muscles and supporting skeletal structure to support the wing size needed for our body weight.
There’s a cartoon illustration floating around the internet somewhere which shows what we would need, with a huge, puffed out chest, out of all proportion to the rest of us
There are three things that make a bird much more suited to flight than a human:
* Bone composition. Many birds have much less dense bones than humans, which means they have less weight hindering them from taking off.
* Musculature. Bird have huge chest muscles to allow them to flap their wings.
* Feathers. Feathers give birds’ wings a ton of surface area to fan the air with, generating lift.
The first human powered flying craft has a wingspan of 111 feet and used the large muscles in the legs to provide the power. Your wingspan is probably under 7 feet, so you’re very very under powered in the wing department and your flapping is way under the power generated by a cyclist’s legs.
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