MIT Daedalus 88 — the 34 m human-powered wing
On 23 April 1988 the Daedalus 88 flew 115.11 km from Crete to Santorini under human power alone, in 3 h 54 min. It still holds the FAI records for straight-line distance and duration for a human-powered aircraft.
The wing is the reason. 34.1 m of span carrying 30.9 m² of area, on an airframe that weighed 31 kg empty. That is a glider's span on a bicycle's power budget, and it is what makes the aeroplane worth reading as an engineering object rather than a stunt.
Sections
Daedalus used a purpose-designed family rather than one section, stepping the profile down the span as Reynolds number falls toward the tip:
| Panel | Section | Design Re |
|---|---|---|
| Centre | DAE-11 | 500 k |
| Mid outer | DAE-21 | 375 k |
| Tip | DAE-31 | 250 k |
| Wingtip | DAE-41 | 150 k |
This model carries DAE-11 at the root and DAE-31 at the tip — the tool blends between two sections, so it captures the direction of the change but not the four-panel step. All four are in the foil.tools library if you want to look at them directly.
This is a fit to published dimensions, not a replica. foil.tools draws a single-taper planform shaped by four splines; the real wing has structure this model does not carry. Span, area and section match the published figures — the metrics above are what this geometry actually produces, so where they differ from a published number, the difference is the fit.
Sources: MIT Daedalus (Wikipedia) · Mark Drela's HPA page, MIT · Cruz, Weight Analysis of the Daedalus Human Powered Aircraft
Published aspect-ratio figures for Daedalus vary between about 32 and 37 depending on which reference area is used, so this post quotes span and area — which are consistent across sources — and lets the aspect ratio fall out of the geometry.
The polars above are foil.tools' own analysis of this model, not published performance data for the aircraft. They are AeroBuildup — strip theory with NeuralFoil sections — for the wing alone, so they exclude the fuselage, the undercarriage and everything else that makes a real aeroplane slower than its wing. Read them for how this shape behaves, and for comparison against the other wings here — not as a figure for the aircraft. Open it in the designer and run your own.