A human-powered helicopter could not fly, experts concluded. Then two young engineers proved them wrong and won a quarter of a million dollars in the process
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When they set out in 2011 to build a human-powered helicopter that could fly 10 feet into the air and hover in one place for 60 seconds, Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson faced one major obstacle: it was supposed to be impossible.
Experts had reached that conclusion after 30 years of failure and crashes, beginning in 1980, when the American Helicopter Society (now AHS International) offered a prize, eventually worth $250,000, for a successful human-powered flight. All evidence suggested that a single pilot simply could not generate enough power to fly that high and for that long. Aeronautical engineer Antonio Filippone of the University of Manchester in England ran through the numbers in a 2007 paper in the and reported that the idea—and any aircraft based on it—just would not fly: “Overall, all the requirements ... of the American Helicopter Society cannot ... realistically be achieved.”
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