No petro nor electricity needed😆
2 Likes
Thought about something like that. To bad we simply can’t produce enough power with our legs to come close to maintaining altitude. Maybe we need the equivalent of an E-bike version of this.
Too much work…lol
How did he launch? I could imagine a moped sort of arrangement that would recharge a battery during flight, as a range extender; but it would have to be kept out of the way during launch, and then unstrapped to drop it into place for pedaling to begin. Or, perhaps, for minimum weight, it might consist of a pair of stirrup straps at each end of a chain or lanyard around a pully attached to the seat or frame and rotating back and forth as each leg pushed in turn to pull a linear “rotor” across an electromagnetic “stator”, thus generating unstable variable power that would be rectified and fed to a capacitor whose voltage would reach a level that could charge the main battery. Even so, I don’t imagine it would actually enable generating enough power to extend the battery range significantly.
Same way the other paragliders did but with the propeller parallel to the ground. It was just for the costume festival and not intended to push or pull the contraption. When he went up it was purely thermal/dynamic lift but the crowed sheered😆
If you wanted to fly faster then a rocket was the next best choice😆
If you were into moving along on wheels then the Flintstones car was it:
![Screen Shot 2021-11-19 at 8.39.25 AM|618x464]
A winged dragon was next😅…
A quick BOE calculation convinces me that an adult human could conceivably produce 400 watts by pedaling to push a distance of half a meter with each leg each half-second, yielding a one-second cycle for the motion of both legs, though I don’t know how long this could be maintained. For a 4KW paramotor, that’s 10% of the power required. If the cyclist could keep that up for a full hour, that would add about 6 minutes to a one-hour nominal range. To me that seems like an awful lot of pedaling for very little gain. Perhaps performing such exercise in the exquisitely beautiful mid-air environment rather than on the ground could be worthwhile, but otherwise I can’t really justify it.
I think I would pursue instead a soft semiconductor photovoltaic collector woven into the parasail fabric. Perhaps this could collect a greater amount of wattage, given the several square meters of wing area.
Human power has come up before and I like to refer to this graph (found here: The Recumbent Bicycle and Human Powered Vehicle Information Center )
Thanks very much for finding and sharing that human-factors data. Apparently my estimate was not far off the mark, though a bit over-optimistic. The data only confirms my evaluation of the power that could be generated as of very little addition to that required for sustained ppg flight – disappointing as that fact may be.
Besides other similar prices, there is still the Kremer prize for some human powered flight challenges. If you can do the miracle of working it out, then it will payout 
Just take a look at the completed challenges and how long it took to fulfil them (some took 20 years). This helps to get an idea of what is possible with focus, a team, cash to spend on the topic and a light athlete to finally deliver the run.
(quoted from Wikipedia)
There are currently three Kremer Prizes that have not yet been awarded, for a total of £150,000:
- 26 mile Marathon course in under an hour (£50,000),
- Sporting aircraft challenge stressing maneuverability (£100,000),
- Local challenge that is limited to youth groups (under 18 years) in the UK.
Did everyone see how much higher or farther he flew than everyone else??? Yeah, either did I! Haha!