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Thee are dozens of successful RC ornithopters flying every day.....and there are several teams around the world working on full-size, manned ornithopters. We have already achieved unassisted lift-offs and are on the verge of successful, sustained flight.
Here's the URL to the video of one of the lift-off tests of the U Of T ornithopter C-GPTR for which I was the test pilot.
http://www.ornithopter.net/images/full-scale.mpg

There are also people working on tandem wing designs which will improve efficiency by capturing the wake shed by the front wing with the leading edge of the rear wing. Far from destroying lift , it will increase it, if done properly.

However, regarding the picture at the top of the page of the multi-winged aircraft.....it certainly does seem to be a hoax that would be incapable of flight due to the design, construction and size of the wings and overall poor design. I agree that it might make a decent underwater vehicle but I can't see it soaring the skies !

PJB, I have no idea about RC planes I was refering to full-sized planes. Perhaps brute force might work on something the size of an RC plane but once you scale it up you run into real problems. A bird's wing (a bat's also I think) does a lot more than just go up and down. The wing not only changes angle-of-attack but changes the airfoil and shape as well. The bird does this by flexing muscles in the wing to change the airfoil and move the fingers to the desired position. To do this non-biologically would require many controls and servos, and would weigh too much, plus the computers needed to control the constant changes would weight too much. Makes me wonder why "bird-brain" is a derogatory phrase. Something the size of an RC plane might have the thrust/weight ratio for the relatively simple controls needed to flap and change angle-of-attack wich might work on a brute-force basis but once you scale up, the power needed for the extra controls/servos would get huge.

PJB, sorry about the double post but after I finished my last post and left the site, I realized you mentioned being a test pilot on an experimental ornithopter. I haven't looked at the video but did you get out of ground-effect? Lots of experimental planes have worked until they got above ground-effect, the "flying bedstead" from Rolls-Royce and the Avrocar come to mind.

I was referring to full-size , piloted [ie: manned] ornithopters too. I only referred to RC ornithopters in passing. During the past 15 years there has been a tremendous amount of research done in the field of flapping wing flight by both universities and private researchers. We are well aware of the highly complex wing kinematics of birds , bats and insects [and pterosaurs especially Quetzalcoatlus northropi which with a wingspan of approx' 36 feet was the size of a small aircraft].

Many different methods of research are being used from actual observation and high speed video in a wing tunnel to robotic flappers to CFD and we now have a very good picture of the flapping wing kinematics and dynamics of birds, bats and insects.

Unfortunately most of this research is directed towards producing MAVs.
However there are a few groups around the world currently working on full-size, piloted [ie: 'manned'] ornithopters. Todays ornithopters are sophisticated aircraft with aeroelastically tailored wings designed to twist and bend appropriately during the flapping cycle. Even so, it would be impossible to replicate the wing kinematics of a bird or bat and so we choose those that we think most important for the higher Re of a full-size aircraft. eg variable stroke plane angle, active pitch control of the spar etc etc.

There are many problems to be overcome to successfully sustain flight in a full-size ornithopter...and this is why it hasn't been done yet !! The University Of Toronto has been testing a full-size ornithopter since 1996. I was the first test- pilot and did all the prototype testing up to the maximum speed of 56mph and including the first lift-offs [we accelerated unassisted [ie using the ornithopter's own engine] from zero to lift-off speed 50mph and then intentionally lifted off]
It took 2 years of testing to achieve this. The problem, of course, is the high speed bouncing of an ornithopter.
We did not go out of ground effect.
The U Of T 'Project Ornithopter' website URL is http://www.ornithopter.net I was their test pilot for 7 years . I resigned eventually in order to work full time on my own design which I hope to start testing this summer.

Some researchers are completely bypassing the problems of take-off by simply towing the ornithopter aloft. This doesn't prove anything in my view.

Severin, just because several seemingly ridiculous claims have turned out to be true, it doesn't follow that every ridiculous claim made is true.

(OK, so I stole that from Carl Sagan. So sue me )

Approximately in 1995 an aeroclub located in Ural mountains area in Russia constructed
and tested a plane with flapping wing drive only, without propellers, without jet motors.
During a test this plane with one pilot on board took off and flied approximately 750 meters in air.