I believe I can fly: On flight and flying machines

1-8 Feb 2010

Lemme ask you a question: “Have you wanted to fly?”

If not, then you’re missing out on the greatest of all human inventions – our ability to fly. Admittedly we fly seated instead of flapping our arms like birds, but it’s certainly better than being landbound… and as a pilot friend of mine once said: “Once you’re up there, you’ll never want to come back down.”

But we might soon find our wings clipped if we don’t figure out how to reduce the ecological cost of flying (and all things locomotive). That’s why we heart this electric plane that allows us to fly from Singapore to KL in a single bound and on $2 too! And in a fit of natural inspiration, they’ve took a leaf out of a tree and modelled a single-wing airplane after it. Apparently it flies pretty ok. If you want it to go down.

But flight isn’t just confined to airplanes. It goes down into the seas with this personal submarine that’s modeled after airplanes and uses aerodynamic principles to float, dive and glide through the seas. And the Russians once tried to cross-breed a tank with a plane with surprising results.

Here’s a weird application where we can levitate things with sound. Originally intended as a way to clean moon and mars vehicles, Acoustic levitation might just be the boost that concerts need to outflank each other.

Finally, we’ve posted up photos of the Singapore Airshow 2010 on our Facebook Fanpage. Y’know… just in case you didn’t make it out to middle-of-nowhere Changi Exhibition Centre.

Click on any photo to see our entire gallery! (Takes you away from this blog)

Please share this post:

| More