Students set new human-powered helicopter flight record

A team of University of Maryland engineering students built a human-powered helicopter that flew for 50 seconds, getting close to the 60 seconds required to win the $250,000 Igor Sikorsky Prize.

A team of engineering students from the University of Maryland broke a new flight record in a human-powered aircraft. Pilot Kyle Gluesenkamp lifted his gymnasium-sized helicopter, Gamera II, about a foot off the ground for 50 seconds. Their record is still unofficial until the National Aeronautic Association rules on it. 

For a helicopter to be considered "human powered," it must be powered only by direct human energy (no batteries or giant rubber bands allowed). Wired's Rhett Allain calculates that it took the furiously pedaling Gluesenkamp about 1,000 watts of power to get Gamera II off the ground. By comparison, elite cyclists can briefly generate up to 2,000 watts of power.  

The Gamera II team discovered that adding hand cranks increased the power output up to 20 percent.

Gamera II is a student design challenge inspired by the American Helicopter Society Sikorsky Prize. Created in 1980 in memory of the helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky, the $250,000 prize requires a craft to attain a height of three meters during a 60-second flight while remaining in a 10 meter square. The prize has not yet been won.

The current official world record is held by a craft named Yuri I, which in 1994 achieved an altitude of about eight inches for just under 20 seconds. Yuri means ‘lilly,' in Japanese, and the craft was named for its flowery shape.

The first human-powered helicopter to lift off the ground was built in 1989 and christened the Da Vinci III, after the Renaissance polymath who first conceived of such a craft. 

Gluesenkamp is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland's Clark School's mechanical engineering department. The other pilots are Colin Gore, Ph.D. candidate in the Clark School's materials science and engineering department, and Denis Bodewits, assistant research scientist in the University of Maryland Department of Astronomy.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Students set new human-powered helicopter flight record
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0626/Students-set-new-human-powered-helicopter-flight-record
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe