The challenge to design a helicopter that could rise three meters from the ground and stay aloft for at least a minute, all while being completely powered by the human pilot, was first introduced in 1980 and has been attempted by countless teams. In June of 2013, Todd Reichert, Cameron Robertson, and their team at Canada’s AeroVelo succeeded in doing just that with Atlas, their 115-pound, 160-foot-wide human-powered helicopter. They were awarded the American Helicopter Society’s Sikorsky Prize for the feat.
This isn’t the first “first” for this team; they built the world’s first human-powered orinthopter (an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings) in 2010. They also set the college human-powered land speed record in 2011 (with a speed of 62+ mi/hr), then broke it in 2011 (72+ mi/hr) and again in 2013 (75+ mi/hr). Their goal for 2014 is to break the world human-powered speed record (and earn the title of World’s Fastest Human) in Battle Mountain, Nevada with the newest version of their “speedbike,” an unusual-looking type of recumbent super-aerodynamic bicycle.
The man powering these amazing creations is Dr. Todd Reichert, an engineer and a co-founder of AeroVelo who is also a cyclist and a competitive speed skater. His intense diet and training regimen for the speedbike challenge is much different than the training required for Atlas’s record-breaking one-minute flight. While the later “required a ten-second climb at 1100 Watts followed by a sustained effort averaging 700 Watts for the remaining minute,” Reichert explains, “training for [Battle Mountain] will require much more aerobic and threshold work, as the five-mile run up takes the athlete from a fairly light start, through a solid time-trial pace midway down course, and to an all-out sprint in the last 45 seconds.”
We wish Reichert and his team the best of luck this year. If you’d like to read more about their engineering projects, visit their website at www.aerovelo.com. And perhaps Reichert’s athletic feats will motivate you as you plan your 2014 adventure and start in on your conditioning work for the upcoming pack season.