At the San Mateo Maker Faire in May, I bought a giant radio-controlled electrically powered robot dragonfly that flies by flapping two pairs of humungeous wings, and has green LEDs so you can operate it in the dark and see what tree it has landed in. I didn’t get around to trying it out till just recently. I still have fond memories of what I think was the first functioning human-made ornithopter ever; it was a toy bird powered by a twisted rubber band -- I used to see them on the streets of Berserkeley when I was in graduate school in the 1970s.

    This gadget is way better. There are two levers on the controller -- one varies the power to the wings, the other operates a reversible tail rotor that provides a semblance of directional control. At full power, the dragonfly’s flight is a series of swoops: The wings don’t really stall, but airflow over the body provides a tail-down force that increases with increased speed, and drops to zero when the beastie noses up and loses speed. This provides a way to turn on the proverbial dime -- pulse the tail rotor at low airspeed. Flight at reduced power is a bit more dignified, but a lot less fun. The overall effect is somewhere between Dune for the Little People and Heinlein’s soggy Mesozoic Venus, particularly at night with the neighborhood cats watching intently.

    The airframe is styrofoam and the wings are some kind of tough, flexible plastic. The unit comes with a spare set of wings and an extra tail rotor. The cats are fascinated, but a bit wary. Cats do such a marvelous “What the hell is that!?” routine at times like this. Yet they always come back after being dive-bombed. The batteries on board provide seven minutes of flight time -- realistically, fifteen or twenty minutes of fun, considering walking to the latest “landing” site, picking up the machine and preparing to launch again. They can be recharged from the set of AA cells in the controller, which are said to last for about an hour total of flying.

    I have a nice long piece of half-inch PVC pipe for knocking it out of trees.  I fly it at night regularly.

    “Goin’ out into the black / Tell them I’m not comin’ back ...”

    Whee!