Fly Powered Aircraft - Neatorama

Photo: Eric Long / Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

It goes without saying that the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has some of the neatest collection of planes in the world, but this one is particularly intriguing: fly-powered aircrafts built by famed aircraft modelered Frank Ehling in the 1970s.

The AirSpace Blog has more:

Designed and built by famed aircraft modeler Frank Ehling in the 1970s, they are the smallest flying models the Museum owns. But more unusual than their size is that they are powered by flies – yes, you heard right, houseflies, the insect. Constructed from balsa wood and red tissue paper, the one-fly design has a wingspan of two inches, and the two-fly version, which features a delta-wing design, is four inches wide. In both cases, contact cement was used to attach the live powerplant to the fuselage.

If you're skeptical, there's a video clip of another fly-powered airplane, this time by inventor Thomas Fetterman (oh, you can also buy the kit from his website)

That video is just too funny, watching the flies take off.

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It's easier after you catch the fly and have it in the baggie to put it in the freezer (or use a canning jar to catch them - bait it with any sliced piece of fruit). Wait 5-10 minutes and you'll have a nice comatose fly - way easier to glue it onto the power stick. Of course timing depends alot on the freezer temp, the size of the fly, etc so you need to experiment before you find the right time to knock them out yet still be able to revive them once warm. Rolling papers pretty much suck as a plane - use thin 3x5 note cards cut to shape and wooden toothpicks (like the top photo). We had tons of fly races in the summer when I was a kid.

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Now President Obama can put that fly-catcher PETA sent him to good use!

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I never imagined that I could feel pity for a fly - Way to go Humans !

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How much is it just being dragged along by the fly, and how much is it actually lifting and doing anything aerodynamically "useful"?

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This reminds me of that Ren and Stimpy episode where they pulled the wings off of flies in gruesome detail.

I know he releases them, and I'd just as soon swat a fly to death, but I still can't help but feel weird about playing with them like that.

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we used to glue a hair to a litle piece of paper with flags drawn on it, and glue it to the fly's butt : WW2 reenactments, Pacific scenarios, battle for England, etc, you name it.

How cruel kids can be :D

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I recall an article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results on this subject.

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Skipweasel has a point- If you make some contraption out of cigarette-paper- Is that contraption an airplane, or just dead-lightweight...? I mean- Can the housefly take on more payload when it uses that airplane? Can it use less energy to stay aloft by using the wing-capacity of the airplane? ...I seriously doubt...

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Fly and Machine... Power...Xtreme!

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It might be difficult to determine how much of the airplane is dead weight. Given that a fly can fly all by itself means that any airplane apparatus is nothing more than a payload. But it isn't impossible that the payload offers usable lift. As a younger man, I was a glider-making fiend, and one of the obsessions was to make tiny gliders. I can tell you that gliders that small are certainly possible, though most of my most successful designs were canards. So the question is, how much pure payload can a fly accomodate? And how much of that payload can be compensated for if it exhibits appreciable lift?

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@cola...i totally agree.

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next we're gonna have ultra light bio-chemical weapons on these things..

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I had the perfect comment, but I just couldn't say it.

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What a buzz kill.

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Do it, ted. Do it.

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