Human Powered Helicopter

The concept for a human powered helicopter came in the 1500s. It’s been tried several times and the best records indicate a less than 12 second flight and a rather short distance. New advances in human powered helicopter designs have be able to move that record to 50 seconds in the air.

Even though there has been a lot of buzz about human powered helicopters over the past several hundred years, the designs and results have been less than promising.  Those of you who dream of a Utopia where we all have a self-powered helicopter will have to imagine a much different future. The only practical design of a human powered helicopter is enormous and requires a professional athlete to operate it for a maximum of just under a minute.

Even if you envision a future world of six-packs abound and healthy-only food products you would still need an acre of land to land and store your helicopter and why bother, it’s only going to fly for less than a minute trip at most anyhow.

Other human powered machines show promise for many applications in the future. The Trikke T 12 cambering vehicle is a carving trike which transfers the energy of leaning into a form of directable propulsion.

No doubt that interest in the human powered helicopter will develop even with the current poor results. There just seems to be something about them that make you want to have one.