I turned the computer screen around for my wife to see.

“Check it out – they’re moving around,” I said, watching the robin’s nest webcam that showed two fledglings in a nest in Old West Lawrence.

“That is really cool,” she said as the still images changed every six seconds on the ljworld.com Web site.

As we watched the robins, I realized that in a few days, with very little prompting, they’d be doing something that humans have always dreamed of doing: flying under their own power.

Daedalus and Da Vinci

For hundreds of thousands of years, men and women have watched and studied birds with wonder.

Early aviation pioneers (see 1889 illustration below) tried to copy the flapping wings of the creatures of the sky. In Greek mythology, Daedalus and Icarus flew with wings of feathers and wax.

Some 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci drew plans for a bat-wing type flapping device he called an ornithopter.

In the last 100 years, we’ve finally learned to take to the air. But the aviation industry – one of the legs of the Kansas economy – was built around the concept of fixed wings for lift and another power source for thrust instead of mechanical flapping wings for both.

However, watching the robins made me wonder whether flapping wings might yet have a place in human flight.

Wheels for wings?

I wondered whether, with all of our advancing technology, including hydraulics and robotics, a personal flying device with flapping wings might be possible.

Just think of it – rather than be trapped in the morning rush hour traffic to get to your job, you could strap on your wings and flap off to work.

Or, for lunch, you and your co-workers could wing off in V formation to a fashionable restaurant roost.

Who knows? You might even be able to swoop down to a movie theater to see the latest Batman flick.

I asked a Kansas University researcher what he thought about the idea of a personal, flapping wing ornithopter.

“I think it would be doable,” said David Earl Alexander, an assistant professor of biological science who studies all types of animal flight.

“If there was some simple way that you could harness your legs, put them to work, and just use your arms for guidance, it wouldn’t be totally impossible,” Alexander said. “There’s quite a bit of inventiveness that would have to go into that.”

Linear motor

Alexander flies radio-controlled model airplanes and has model ornithopters. He researches animal and insect flight and what they might teach us for our own flight technology.

• David Earl Alexander, a Kansas University assistant

  professor of biological sciences, discusses the possibility of a

  personal ornithopter device.

• Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac, professor of aerospace

  engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, discusses the concept

  of personal ornithopters.

“The reason that animals flap their wings is that they’re powered by muscles – they’re sort of a linear motor,” Alexander said. “And, you know, if animals had evolved propeller shafts, they would probably use propellers instead, because a rotary motion is more efficient.”

But, stuck with muscles that contract and can’t rotate, they developed the up-and-down movements of the flapping wings.

Think we’re too big to fly?

The largest known animal that ever flapped through the skies was a Texas pterosaur called the Quetzalcoatlus northropi, Alexander said.

It weighed about 200 pounds, had a wingspan of about 30 feet and lived about 65 million years ago.

Enhanced power

While toy-sized ornithopters have been built since the 1870s, there are a couple of reasons no device has been built that can take off and land with human power, Alexander said.

“We’re just not powerful enough to produce enough arm power to lift our own weight,” Alexander said.

Most of our muscle mass is in the wrong place: our legs and hips. That’s just dead weight if you’re trying to fly, he explained.

That’s also why all the human-powered fixed-wing airplanes that have been built are pedal-powered and not oar-powered, he said.

But Alexander said there might be promise in the idea of making a flapping wing device that could strengthen your arm and leg power enough to get you off the ground.

For example, “if you were wearing some sort of an enhanced ectoskeleton-like thing.”

However, it would take a lot of training to figure out how to move the wings to go up, down, left and right, he said.

“It would be a lot harder than riding a bike,” he said. “I think it would be somewhere between flying a fixed-wing airplane and flying a helicopter.”

Robotic flying bugs

A NASA researcher also thinks such a flapping wing personal device could be possible – but something powered with more than human muscle.

Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is working on a project to help develop a flying robotic bug, the Entomopter, to send to Mars. Such a dragonfly-like robot would be able to hover and move at slow speeds and photograph objects.

Isaac is reviewing the research of biologists to work on building the flapping wings for the mechanical insect.

Larger flying birds spend most of their time gliding rather than flapping. An ornithopter built for humans would probably work in a similar way, he said.

“I would say a short duration flight, it might be possible with augmented power,” he said. “If we can come up with a powerful, very concentrated power source that can be used, it might be possible to fly.”

Isaac estimated that we might see such a device in 20 years, but it probably wouldn’t be used widely.

“Initially it would be more like people doing it for fun,” Isaac said.

Last great quest

Probably the most well-known flapping wing research is Project Ornithopter, now under way at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (www.ornithopter.net).

James DeLaurier and Jeremy Harris have been researching and building ornithopters since 1973. In 1991, they built and flew a radio-controlled quarter-scale, proof-of-concept model that established the technological foundation for a full-scale flapping wing aircraft that could carry a pilot.

They are seeking to accomplish one of the last great quests in aviation – for a piloted plane to use flapping wings to accelerate down a runway and eventually take off under its own power.

It hasn’t been done since Adalbert Schmid built one in 1942 in Germany.

DeLaurier, who has been featured on the Discovery Channel, CNN and in Popular Science, has done some taxi tests and had some brief lift-offs with the full-scale model.

I talked with Paul Gallivan, one of the team members of the project, who said there would be spin-off technology from the project that would be useful to the aviation and growing robotics industry.

For example, he thinks that tiny robotic ornithopters, such as a dragonfly-sized device, would be useful in getting cameras in remote locations.

But airlines probably don’t need to worry about such devices plucking their passengers.

“It doesn’t look like large-scale ornithopters have much of a promise,” he said.

Bird dog

I heard some birds chirping outside in my back yard.

When I went to look, I saw a blue jay glide in, then walk up to a dish of dog food on my patio.

My dog came bounding up. The blue jay and several other birds hopped into the air, squawking and flapping off to safety. Bailey sometimes catches one. But not this time.

Bailey came back and ate a few bites of the dog food, snapped at some flies buzzing her, then went over to the shade to watch and wait.

I wondered if dogs, too, dream of having wings. I shrugged and went out to get a Red Bull.