For the many wondrous things humans can do, we can’t fly on our own. But if we could, how big would our wings be?
Of course, the answer depends on the person’s size. But someone who’s about 155 pounds (70 kilograms) and at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall would have a wingspan of about 20 feet (6 m), said Ty Hedrick, a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “which I thought was surprisingly small.”
Hedrick arrived at this figure using an equation developed by Robert Nudds, a senior lecturer in biological sciences at the University of Manchester. Nudds described this equation in a 2007 paper published in the Journal of Avian Biology, in which he describes the scaling of bird wing parameters with respect to body mass.
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