Human winged flight wows us. Then the hoax claims commence...

I'll let you into a personal secret. You know how most people have those recurring dreams - like you've turned up at school still in your pyjamas? My dream for many years was that I could fly. Just by flapping my arms. A lot. But I could maintain height, hovering near the ceiling. It's been some years since I last had that dream, but I have always harboured a desire to really fly.

So this morning when through Twitter came this video, well you could say I was kind of excited. A lot.
(PS: there's some language at the end after he lands - feel free to stop it before that if concerned or kids around. You're not missing anything.)

Into flight - from a standing start. Granted you can clearly see that it's powered-assisted flight. He is simply waving his arms up and down, and the partially mechanised wings are following this motion, with manual tethers to the wing tips.

And we've seen before that the motion of wings can be mimicked mechanically in this robot bird.



But since this went globally viral, the hoax claims have come thick and fast. This critique on Tech Crunch seems to totally miss the point in arguing that human arm strength couldn't sustain the wings. He isn't moving the wings completely by himself. Are these people incapable of checking out the other videos on the guy's YouTube channel that show how the wings have assisted drives? One of the clips shows an early CAD design with bands to go around the arms, which appear to have been abandoned in later designs. The clips are crappy, disjointed and leave big holes in the story.

Wired has had a more considered go at analysing the evidence as it stands.

If it's a con, then it's an amazingly well but incompetently done con. It's hard to believe that a con wouldn't have laid things out a bit more coherently. I think I prefer to believe it was true. And I want to try it.

Via @sumenrai79