Todd Reichert and a team of young engineers set out to do what the Icarus myth only imagined: build a human-powered ornithopter, a flying machine propelled by flapping wings rather than a fixed propeller. The film follows their design process from the ground up, mixing the mechanical problem of generating enough lift and thrust from human muscle with the older story of why humans have wanted to fly like birds in the first place. Engineering sessions, wind-tunnel-style testing, and workshop builds sit alongside footage tracing the mythology of flight back through Icarus and earlier attempts at wing-powered aircraft. The team's prototype gets pushed toward an actual flight attempt, with the setbacks and redesigns that come with trying to make a decades-old aviation dream airborne on human power alone. It plays as both a science documentary about aerodynamics and materials, and a character piece about a small group of engineers betting years of work on getting a machine, and themselves, off the ground.