Alt Bike Culture - Anyone in history made a flying bicycle?

What ordinary use (besides recreation) do you have in mind? Delivering the mail, crop dusting, pulling advertising signs across the skies, aerial mapping, acting as a shuttle between urban airports, launching spaceship one?
How about "typical weather conditions"?
How much would you use your bicycles if you couldn't ride them if there was more than ~2 MPH winds?

To be more stable in choppier wind, and aircraft needs a higher wing loading per-square-foot/meter, which normally just means smaller wings,,, but a higher wing loading also requires higher flight speeds, which takes a LOT more power. Which is the one thing a human-powered aircraft isn't ever going to have.

To be more stable in choppier wind, and aircraft needs a higher wing loading per-square-foot/meter, which normally just means smaller wings,,, but a higher wing loading also requires higher flight speeds, which takes a LOT more power. Which is the one thing a human-powered aircraft isn't ever going to have.

So what are you trying to tell me that I don't already know? That people don't have hollow bones and their skulls are entirely too heavy and that they don't have long enough fingers with webbing between them.

Flying bicycles are recreational. They are flown for fun and for the novelty of it. Duh! We get it.

You still didn't answer my question, so I'll add some more possibilites, trans continental stealth reconnaissance, high speed high volume passenger transit, aerobatics, combat aircraft, high-altitude solar research.

Flying bicycles are recreational. They are flown for fun and for the novelty of it. Duh! We get it.

You still didn't answer my question, so I'll add some more possibilites, trans continental stealth reconnaissance, high speed high volume passenger transit, aerobatics, combat aircraft, high-altitude solar research.

Arky, why are you arguing about this? You already admitted and agreed to the fact that flying bicycles are for recreational purposes - a novety. So why go off on a tangent about other possibilities that you know can't be done by human power nor has anyone here even alluded to the possibility that it can be done. Your little tangent is totally senseless.

Even further afield- a human-powered ornithopter: http://www.youtube.com/user/OrnithopterProject#p/a/f/0/0E77j1imdhQ
although I'll grant you that it was towed into the air. Self-launching a flapping wing HPA would seem to require superhuman strength or the right size cliff.

Arky, why are you arguing about this? You already admitted and agreed to the fact that flying bicycles are for recreational purposes - a novety. So why go off on a tangent about other possibilities that you know can't be done by human power nor has anyone here even alluded to the possibility that it can be done. Your little tangent is totally senseless.

By "admitted and agreed to", you make it sound like I argued that human propelled aircraft had other uses than recreational or sports, and then confessed that I had been in error. I didn't.

Doug5150 never answered my question, when I asked him what he considered ordinary use; what uses he had in mind besides recreational. There is such a spectrum of uses for aircraft, and none will do everything well; what is ordinary? I was hoping to get him to be specific about what he meant by ordinary use.

Even further afield- a human-powered ornithopter: http://www.youtube.com/user/OrnithopterProject#p/a/f/0/0E77j1imdhQ
although I'll grant you that it was towed into the air. Self-launching a flapping wing HPA would seem to require superhuman strength or the right size cliff.

That was beautiful.

That was beautiful.

I've never seen that. It was great.

http://forum.templepilots.com/index.php?topic=176.0

Still trying to go up, not down...

http://forum.templepilots.com/index.php?topic=176.0

Still trying to go up, not down...

Sadly, the video has been turned off. Interesting concept though, human powered parasail.