Mankind has always looked to the skies to go higher and higher, from skyscrapers to planes and even space shuttles that reach beyond our atmosphere. Single-man “flight” is already possible with skydiving and paragliding. Prototype jetpacks have brought true “flight” into the realm of possibility. However, none of those options are really what people look for in a superpower. To find real flight, we have to first look to nature for the solution.
It’s a Bird (or Bat or Bug)
In the early world of flying devices, engineers based their designs mostly off of bird wings. Unfortunately for those early engineers, they took this a little too literally. The ornithopter was one of the earliest devices based off of bird wings, and it had wings of its own - that flapped. Needless to say, the ornithopter was never powerful enough to flap its wings fast enough to get off the ground.
Later devices (such as airplanes) focused more on wings meant for gliding. In those devices, the main lift force came from backward-facing engines mounted on the wings. But there’s nothing really fantastical about airplane wings or gliders. Humans with wings are a different matter.
There are many variations on the typical human with feathered-wings image that you first think up when you imagine a winged person. These vary from bright bird of paradise wings to furry bat wings to lightly-scaled insect wings. Fairies with delicate insect wings have always been popular in folklore as mischievous beings that like nothing more than to cause trouble for humans. Angels, on the other hand, are famed for being protectors of mankind.
Logically, though, insect wings wouldn’t work too well with a typical human body. Unlike bird and bat wings, insect wings don’t have any muscles in them. They’re made of chitin, which is kind of like the stuff fingernails are made of. All their flight muscles are in their thorax and are the most powerful type of muscle in nature for their size.
Even with muscles that strong, insect flight would be physically impossible if they flapped their wings like birds. This is because of the difference in wing to body ratio. Insects have much smaller wings compared to their body mass. To get over this problem, most insects flap their wings in a particular figure-eight pattern that gives them thrust both from flapping their wings downward and upward.
If the average human tried to fly with insect wings, they would need to be at least 100 pounds lighter, just for starters. They would also need so many flight muscles packed into their torso that they wouldn’t have room for any organs. So… human flight with insect wings isn’t too probable. It’s still a fascinating idea, though.
Humans flying with bird or bat wings, might relatively more realistic. However, unlike how they’re often described in stories, functional wings wouldn’t be easy to hide. The main problem is how heavy humans are and how much force is needed to take off.
A 200 lbs human would need around a 50 foot wingspan. That’s easily longer than most buses and would probably mean that you wouldn’t be fitting through standard-sized doorways any time soon. To be able to shrink those wings down to a manageable size, you would have to go on a serious diet - or get lighter bones.
Birds, especially larger ones like cranes and condors, are able to fly because they have much lighter bones than land animals. The inside of their bones are mostly hollow, with strong lattice structures that keep them from breaking easily. The hollow spaces in their bones aren’t just to free up weight, though. Some of them store air sacs to provide extra oxygen during flight.
For a human to have any chance of actually flying this way, they would definitely need to have hollow bones. Just by making the conversion, you could lose a whopping total of… about 20 lbs (for a 200 pound human). Turns out, most of the weight in a human body is in the muscles and organs. This weight would decrease even further if you take into account how much muscle mass is needed to support non-hollow human bones (and which could be removed if you made the conversion to hollow bones).
Unfortunately, it still probably wouldn’t be enough of a decrease in weight to make functional wings with a manageable wingspan. The Wandering Albatross might have the solution: long, skinny wings. Like most seabirds, the Wandering Albatross has very long, skinny wings. They are so long, in fact, that Wandering Albatrosses have the longest wingspans of all living birds, up to 12 feet in length.
These huge wings are enough to keep one of the biggest flying birds on Earth aloft. Because they’re so skinny, they don’t seem too bulky. However, this is partly because a bird’s body is made to hold wings. A bird’s wings fold tightly to the sides of their body, not to their back like the wings of winged humans do in books.
This brings up another problem: where to put the wings. The second biggest problem with winged humans, besides their weight, is how there would be enough room in a human body to add two extra limbs. Most warm blooded animals, like mammals and birds, have four limbs they use for locomotion. For the purpose of debate, we’ll leave out flightless birds - which don’t really use their wings to move around - and marine mammals - whose limbs (if they can be qualified as limbs) are completely different from land mammals’.
With mammals, those four limbs are usually four muscular legs used for running or climbing. With birds, those four limbs are usually two powerful wings for flight and two skinny legs for perching, hopping on the ground, and/or catching prey. To move and control a functional limb, there needs to be a lot of muscles behind it. The stronger the limb needs to be, the more (or at least, the stronger) the muscles need to be.
Those muscles take up a lot of space, which is probably why birds and mammals don’t have four legs and two wings. They wouldn’t have enough room in their shoulders for both forelegs and wings. There wouldn’t be much room in the middle of their torso, either, because of all the organs that need to be there.
This would mean that a human with actual, functional wings, would need to have major anatomical differences from the two-legged, two-armed species we know today. Having wings instead of arms might be plausible (if we ignored how big they would actually have to be). And hey, there’s always magic to save the day - just give a creature the ability to shape-shift their arms into wings or their whole body into a bird.
In the end, a winged human would be very implausible without the involvement of serious magic. And realistically functional wings wouldn’t be easily hidden beneath clothing. There are other, more mysterious ways to fly, though, and I will cover those in my next post:
For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you liked it, please comment below about what you liked and feel free to share the post on social media. I’d also love to hear your suggestions for super powers, magical creatures, and other fantasy topics for future posts.