http://www.furaffinity.net/view/19910830/

So like I said, I went kinda crazy designing this macro-powered airline. Here’s some of my thoughts about this, going roughly from top left to bottom right.

I picked a scale of around 100:1 for the macro/micro sizes, but this could probably be done at any scale of at least 20:1 or more. The basic idea is that the macro bird (or “pilot”) wears a backpack from which canisters containing the passengers are loosely hung. The main reason for this is to reduce the amount of bouncing the passengers experience. It would be pretty unbearable to be swaying around for hours on end. Of course, I don’t know how exactly the pilot would fly. It’s hard enough to figure out the position in which an anthro bird would fly, let alone a macro one. They could fly “upright”, but they wouldn’t be able to fly very fast because of the drag. They could fly in a more horizontal position, but then there’s issues with the center of lift vs. center of mass. As anyone who plays KSP knows, a plane with a center of lift far forward of its center of mass will tend to flip back, and our pilot would have a similar problem. I decided to handwave the physics and assume a horizontal flight position.

From there, I looked at the design of the canisters. Each one is a cylinder suspended from the top. There are three floors of seats, holding a total of 80 passengers and two crew (this may really need more crew, ex. stewards). Some of the extra space is used for luggage, emergency supplies, and parachutes. The “copilots” sit at the top, and the bathroom is in the middle of the second floor. Windows are on the sides. In the event of an emergency, the two copilots could pull the eject handle and deploy parachutes for the canister. The luggage area could also be used as a crumple zone.

The backpack itself would hold two canisters at a time. The canisters are fixed to a truss mounted on a bow spring, which is designed to absorb the vertical oscillations. The canisters can also swing slightly to reduce horizontal motion. The canisters are also held with secondary wires in case the truss connection fails. Finally, the canisters are connected to the backpack by wire for power, communication, etc. Power could maybe come from a turbine generator, or from the motion of the pilot’s wings, or just be stored in batteries on the backpack. As for the backpack itself, it also has a front shell designed to make the pack more aerodynamic. It also has emergency supplies and a (relatively) small parachute for the pilot. It would also contain instruments and communication equipment, but I didn’t really consider that in detail.

At the bottom, I looked at how the canisters would be loaded with passengers and installed on the backpacks. Passengers would load into all three levels of a canister, which would be sitting on a platform. Then, a macro engineer would pick up the canister, using wrist straps to prevent accidentally dropping it. They would install it into the pilot’s backpack, attaching the truss, wires, etc. Once both canisters were loaded, the passengers would buckle up while the pilot takes off.

So that’s my ridiculously long description of an invention for something that doesn’t even exist, but hey, I had fun with it. Thanks for sticking around if you made it this far.