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World's First Human-Powered Ornithopter

OrnithopterProject · 1.1M views · 2010-09-22 · 2:24

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Overview

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

On Hacker News

Used as the real example of human-powered flapping flight, in contrast to hoaxes and other human-powered aircraft discussions.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2012–2026

Topics

Aviation & aerospace engineeringMechanical & precision engineering
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ornithopterhuman-powered flightaviationengineeringuniversity of toronto

What people said

knowtheory · 2012-03 · Strong recommendation

Why not deride the film maker? The problem i have with him is the same problem that i have with all liars. Namely, that the world is such an interesting and fascinating place, that wasting time on hoaxes and stupid "ha ha! i tricked you!" sorts of media is largely pointless. This dude can claim that his effort was really an "experiment" about online media and how to tell a story, but frankly, I think that's bullshit. This guy isn't doing research about what it takes a viral video to study viral videos so that society might better understand how it is that information is passed between members of a network (and there are folks who study this sort of thing). This dude is just trying to make a project of his go viral. I really see very little distinction between this project and any other sort of fame-whoring, save for the amount of effort put in. So, please tell me if you can, why this hoax is an improvement, or even a useful fiction in the face of real science/engineering awesomeness like this: [VIDEO]

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antipurist · 2026-01 · Reference

Human-carrying birds have been built. Piloted ornithopter: [LINK] Human-powered ornithopter: [VIDEO] Also, Quetzalcoatlus northropi could've been powerful enough to carry a human.

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yurisagalov · 2012-05 · Reference

This project is from the same team that recently set the Guinness World Record by building a Human Powered Ornithopter ( [VIDEO] )

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Sources

Video by OrnithopterProject, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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