FanWing
March 3, 2010
Check out the video below of the FanWing. It’s a pretty genius application of Beroulli’s principle to the technology of flight. If you are going to rely on Bernoulli and airfoils to get into the air, you can either force the wing through the air to generate lift (with jet engines, rotors, or the like)… Or you can force the air across the wing to generate lift. The latter is exactly what Patrick Peebles has done with his FanWing! If he wasn’t the first to think of this alternative method of implementing airfoil-based flight, then I’ll bet that he was the first to successfully pull it off. Here’s the video (fun part begins around 0:40):
It will be interesting to see if this tech can be scaled up for human transport.
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This seems like an excellent way to fly at low speed, but many people would prefer to fly at high speed. Being able to take off and land at low speed is useful but if it limits you to flying at low speed during the rest of the flight, it’s not good transportation, although it would be work for any applications where you simply want to go up in the air.