German Man Flies Using Own Power - 1934 New York Times

Another hidden Nazi technology. These were from 1934 in Germany, the year hitler and the Nazis came into power.
Pictures show a man by the name of Otfried Koycher powering a special engine using only body power.
Rotors were attached by a bar and were powered by his "air". But this seems unlikely.
It would seem that there is more to this story than we were told. Perhaps they wanted to keep the tech hidden by lying about how its powered.
Likely, the New York Times messed up on the story as the original newspaper and photos were from Germany.

1st photo below shows the German Newspaper clip.

The First Human-Powered Flight Succeeds!
The young aircraft engineer Otfried Koycher keeps himself aloft almost 42 seconds using his own body's energy!

The dream of Icarus has, thanks to modern technology, become a reality: The first man has succeeded in flying by means of his own body's energy.

The young flight engineer Otfried Koycher built a lung-powered rotor-flight machine. Carbon dioxide from the alveoli of the lungs is used as fuel to drive a small motor, whose power is sufficient to provide lift to the two highly sensitive rotors, which also serve as wings.

Twilight still fills the early spring morning of the Staakener test field … As a small select group gathers to witness a turning point in the still young history of flying. After a short while filled with anticipation, Otfried Koycher, the inventor of the lung-powered flight machine, appears on the airfield. The silvery white rotors shimmering in the morning light require no complicated preparation. Koycher attaches the surprisingly simple apparatus to his body with a minimum of effort. Koycher stands on his landing skis... a short moment of extreme tension ... a small expression of strain can be seen in the features of the young inventor... and already a small gap can be seen between the ground and the skis.

The gap abruptly widens: the first man to fly under his own power. After 42 seconds, he lands back on the earth, beaming with happiness.

New York Times




Ghost

Reminds me of these

a reply to: ghostrager

Well that is certainly an odd looking contraption. I can't imagine that it was real, likely propaganda to get others to believe they had some great tech. I mean how did he get any lift or steer at all? He just has 2 big tube sticking off his sides and a pair of skis on.

Very cook thread and articles though...thanks!

originally posted by: bullcat
Reminds me of these

Ha....the guy in the second video looks a bit hesitant....

So I have a Newspapers.com account and looked up the guys name, and oddly enough this was a HOAX that was originally put in a magazine on none other than April Fools Day....ironic! Here is the article...it was written in 1934.

And what is today's date?

a reply to: Vasa Croe

Haha I was hoping it would last longer.

Here is the story from TIME:
time.com...

Although the exact origin of April Fools’ Day is uncertain, playing springtime pranks is a nearly universal custom, adopted around the globe and throughout history — perhaps, some have suggested, beginning with the Roman festival of Hilaria, which was celebrated by dressing up in disguise. Over the past century, April 1 hijinks have become a mainstay of Western culture.

One of the more legendary jokes came in 1934, when a German news magazine published a photo of a man on skis, propelling himself into the air by blowing into a straw to turn a pair of rotors. Many American newspapers were taken in by the hoax, including the New York Times, which ran the photo with the caption, “Man flies on his own power for the first time in history.”

TIME, however, was not fooled, as an article from later that month made clear:

Surely Pilot Kocher‘s exploit was major news, yet not one word of it had appeared in print in the U. S. until the pictures arrived. There was good reason why. Pilot Kocher had flown only in the fertile imaginations of the editors of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, who had cooked up the pictures for their magazine’s famed annual April Fool edition. Hearst’s International News had been gloriously hoaxed, and the U. S. Press with it. But in borrowing the Illustrirte Zeitung‘s feature, the International News editors missed two ingenious points: 1) The pilot did not simply blow the rotors around by sheer lung-power. He breathed normally into the box, in which a marvelous chemical contrivance converted the carbon dioxide of his breath into fuel to run a small motor which turned the rotors! (As everyone should know, carbon dioxide is anything but combustible.) 2) The pilot’s name, Koycher (not Kocher), was a freak spelling of Kencher which means “puffer” or “hot air merchant.”
But it wasn’t long before the kind of flight news that would have once been an obvious hoax began to seem feasible: in 1937, faux-pilot Koycher showed up again in the pages of TIME, but as a counterexample. “Three years ago, like many another newspaper, the New York Times carried an astonishing picture of a man on skis propelling himself off the ground by puffing into a pair of rotors. It turned out to be an April Fooler concocted by the editors of Germany’s Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung,” TIME noted. “Last week, however, the feat which Icarus and Leonardo da Vinci made famous by failure was finally achieved. In Milan, where Leonardo experimented with flapping wings 400 years ago, Pilot Vittorio Bonomi took off, flew five-eighths of a mile in a bicycle plane worked only by his own strength.”

a reply to: ghostrager

hahaha... You got me.

I was sitting here trying to come up with ways anything that looked like that could fly.

I should not be on ATS today.

This is/was a 1934 AF.......

So.. The Rocket Man twiddles his nipples and jumps into the air to fly

This guy... warbles his nostrils.