Bath (circa 2012)

The Bath University Man Powered Flight, or BUMPF, was a Human Powered Aircraft (HPA) project within the University of Bath’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The project team was made up of final year mechanical and aerospace engineering students studying for masters degrees.

Gareth Evans first started the project in his living room, designing and building the fuselage, propellers, rudder and elevator of the aircraft. In 2010, Gareth donated his aircraft to the University of Bath to see the aircraft develop further, with two students, Dan Scarfe and Jon Cherry, final year aerospace engineering students at the University, completing the aircraft as part of their degree.

In 2012, the machine was entered into the Royal Aeronautical Society Icarus Cup Competition, which took place on 13 – 22 July of that year at Lasham Airfield, UK. Bath University had unfortunately to pull its HPA, now named Noctule, out of the competition the night before, due to the wing detaching itself from the main body of the aircraft.

In February 2015 seven Aerospace Engineering students were tasked to design a Human Powered Aircraft from scratch. The Bath University Man Powered AirCraft (BUMPAC) team, led by Lewis Rawlinson, designed an innovative aircraft with rigid lift struts and modern composite structure. A year later four of the original members based their final-year engineering projects around HPAs and came together to revive BUMPAC and continue the work started by HPA teams before.

Inheriting a skeleton set of wings, a fuselage and a few other components, the team redesigned the aircraft, now named Angel. It was entered in the July 2016 BHPFC Sywell competition. Unfortunately an accident on its third flight curtailed any further flights.