Look at the arms on that thing!

And look at the longest "finger". That's the little finger.

Hold your arms up and out. Now wiggle your little finger up and down. That's how bats fly. Their arms don't get that tired because they don't move them much, just if they need a lot of power like taking off. But you look at them fly they're really just wagging their pinkies, this is what gives them mammalian flight characteristics and why bats look different from birds when they fly, birds use the whole wing, bats wag their pinkies.

The thing that gets me is how much, water millions of years of evolution, this doesn't look like a plane.

If it possible we could build a real bat-suit that man could actually fly in ?

Beware of anyone who says anything is impossible. Remember the gossamer albatross.

A good first step would be to build a titanium and carbon fibre wingsuit that looks like this (notice the wings start forward of the head, this is important and we don't do this right producing too much turbulence n the wrong place) strapon a 'chute and hope out of a very high airplane.

First you'll dive and you want to do that to make sure the wings aren't ripped off. Then you have to learn really quickly to brake from 300 mph to 60 mph without again tearing the wings, or your arms, clean off.

Now that you're down to 60 it's time to spread your wings and it'll act like a wingsuit, but:

1) If you can catch a thermal it should lift you, and you should be able to stay aloft like a glider pilot. fucing 2) Flap your wings. Nobody on the planet knows what will happen next because we've never tried this before. We started in the 1910s but the Wright brothers made short work of those experiments.

Can i jump off a tall building and commute half a mile ? I Don't need to fly south for the summer but I bet the rate of descent can be reduced with something like this to make it a practical mode of transportation for at least some distances.

That is if you can get your head around the whole jumping off a building thing.

This sounds crazy, but keep one thing in mind. The only animals on our planet that can really fly... where'd they come from?

Dinosaurs. Those things we think are primitive and extinct. Look up, see those things? That's how primitive they are, they're flying under their own power unassisted while you're stuck on the ground gawking at these primitive creatures - who have a billion years of evolution we don't, we're version two and Reptilia evolved flight right about the time we as a species were figuring out which berries didn't turn our poop orange. Who could stare at a live T. rex and question how many years until these start flying? It's the least probable thing on earth, but nature doesn't care for probable.

The bat is the only flying mammal. Millions of years of evolution gave one mammal this ability. Making this work for man is strictly a mechanical problem. I think on a day with a good stiff breeze and with the right suit you can run, flap your wings and you're airborne, baby.

I say this because I've done it.

Not far and not for long but on a certain very windy day when I was barely 8 and the wind was so strong I could lean forward one foot and not fall over (my metric) I ran into the wind with the best bat suit a resourceful almost 8 year old cold build (note: no carbon fibre or titanium) and jumped and started flapping.

Now without wings if you do this and you're almost 8 and skinny with strong legs then you actually get a bit of lift through kite like action and then fall to earth onto a pile of foam pads rear car seat inserts in a previous life that you found in a shed. But with wings this is greatly amplified and I got about 12 feet before I panicked and landed spectacularly on the asphalt with all the grace style and elegance of a bat... with late stage rabies. I too flapped my wings around in the ground (but didn't bite anybody or die, obviously)

Never did that again, too dangerous, god knows how high I could have got if I tried that again which leads me to the conclusion there is en entire body of work by nearly 8 year old budding flight engineers that remains always secret. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble you'd be in if your mother sees you fall from the sky?

I have less than no desire to jump off a building or out of a plane and parachuting scared me to death and I'm not even sure I like planes any more.

But I reckon there's' enough crazy bastards that do stuff like that and now that wingsuits are a thing, why don't we think about a mechanical adjunct to make man what he might be if he evolved into a flighted creature similar to a bat? It may be impractical. It maybe hard. But it'll do something and nobody knows how much, how far or how high?