Imagine strapping on big wings and flapping your arms. That is only pretend. A human's arm and chest muscles are not strong enough to flap wings big enough to lift a person. Never jump from a high place to try to fly. Let's see how real fliers do it. Birds fly by flapping their wings. Their wings are covered in feathers. Many birds have hollow bones, which keep them light so they can fly.
Let's look at birds that save their energy. Big birds such as eagles and storks have broad wings. The wings let them soar on rising warm air, so they save the energy of flapping. An albatross can stay in the air for hours while hardly flapping its wings. As of November 2026, the wandering albatross has the widest wings of any living bird. They are about 11 to 12 feet (3.4 to 3.6 meters) from tip to tip.
Lift is the force that holds an airplane up in the air. It is made by air moving past the wings. Without air there is no lift. A wing needs air moving past it, so wings do not work in space. The Wright brothers' first airplane flight, in 1903, lasted only 12 seconds. The airplane flew 120 feet (37 meters) through the air.
Leonardo da Vinci sketched flying machines with flapping wings. That was more than 500 years ago, in the late 1400s. In the 1890s Otto Lilienthal, a German engineer, built gliders. He made more than 2,000 glider flights. An ornithopter is a bird-like machine that flaps its wings to make lift and thrust. The Snowbird, built by a University of Toronto team, had flapping wings 32 meters (105 feet) across.
Pedal power can get a person into the air. In 1979 a pilot pedaled the Gossamer Albatross, a human-powered airplane, across the English Channel. It went about 36 kilometers (22 miles) in 2 hours 49 minutes. In 1988 the human-powered airplane Daedalus flew about 115 kilometers (72 miles) across the sea from Crete to Santorini in Greece. The Daedalus used bicycle pedals to turn a big, slow propeller. It weighed less than 70 pounds.
Words to know
- soar: glide high
- gliders: engine-free aircraft
- propeller: spinning blades
- ornithopter: flapping machine
- lift: upward force
