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Depending on exactly what you're thinking of, it could be Those Magnificent Flying Machines. From the bullet points: "Powered by ... bicycle pedals" and "fragile-looking frame".
^ Seconded
Worth noting that pretty much all of these are just fundamentally impossible without engineering and operators bordering on Charles Atlas Superpower and Applied Phlebotinum. The first human-powered aircraft flight was basically a collaboration between a couple engineers and a professional-class cyclist in the 1930s - his record was an actually-kind-of-impressive 1 km, but nobody else could get the thing off the ground without the help of a launch catapult, and if his unassisted takeoffs weren't just exaggeration they might have been more the result of very favorable winds. Took until the late 80's for MIT to produce a proper human-powered ultralight that made a flight from Crete to Santorini, and as far as helicopter-type craft go, the first real sustained liftoff was managed in 2013.
Edited by Scorpion451
Well I was thinking about the modern ones. In Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama one such high-tech cycling plane is used to reach the ship's "south pole" . Or in Please Teacher! one of the teachers has man-powered flying as a hobby and even wins a competition.
Humankind is like a train. No matter how powerful the locomotive is, it can only travel as fast as its slowest car allows it to.
Yep, those would both be Magnificent Flying Machines; the former in it's Simple, yet Awesome form (a user-friendly pedal-powered flying machine as an apex product of advanced technology), the later in it's Homemade Inventions form.
Exactly What It Says on the Tin - a fragile lightweight flying machine that runs on its pilot's muscle power.
I just hope this doesn't fall under People Sit on Chairs.
Edited by sohibil