http://angharad-gam.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] angharad-gam.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] misslj_author 2011-07-07 11:30 am (UTC)

I read something this week that I thought might tickle your fancy.

It was in a book this guy has written in which he does various off the cuff calculations that take his fancy (like how many flies it would take to pull a car). I read some strange things sometimes.

Anyway, one of the things he worked out was the wing area necessary to lift a large man (or in other words how aeronautically feasible are angels). He demonstrated that with a take off run equivalent to a top Olympic sprinter an angel would need wings that were 9 square metres in area each. An angel with more reasonable 3 square metre wings would need to be going at about 90km/hr to achieve sufficient lift.

However I should point out that he was assuming a fixed wing angel, and an angel who could beat his wings with some force would generate some of the necessary lift without having to be moving at all.

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