Would breasts make human powered flight harder?

Question

I don’t have breasts. Ok, in all seriousness, when I look up how much breasts weigh all I get in answers like “30,000 bees per bong” and all my female friends don’t know the answer. Could removing breasts reduces someone’s weight enough to make human powered flight easier?

Also, would breasts limit the range of arm motion needed to produce a flight stroke?

One more thing, people in my story setting live on a world with a third Earth’s gravity and a super dense atmosphere so humans can fly with artificial wings.

Answer 1

Actually, it's probably more accurate to say that men could only fly if they developed 'breasts'.

Not in the female sense of course, but the fact is that female breasts sit more or less neatly over the pectoral muscles of the chest. Assuming that your flight mechanism is similar to birds and that wings are formed from arms and hands like in birds, it's the pectoral muscles that are going to do all the real work.

Modern day birds are not evolved from pterasaurs; they're evolved from therapods, like velociraptor. This is because they used their front arms to grab, and developed very strong muscles in their chests to drive their claws at their prey. Eventually, those muscles were used not only to repeatedly strike at other creatures but to flap the arms, which become wings, and the therapods take flight.

This is also why breast meat on chickens and turkeys is the lowest fat but largest single body of muscle on the bird - it's the part of the bird that really powers flight.

It is further important to note that all other things being equal, women are in no way restricted from developing their pectoral muscles to the same extent as men just because of their breasts. Men or women capable of flight in the same manner as birds are would have greatly developed pectoral muscles, which (according to most commentators on the subject) would make both genders more attractive without reducing breast size in women at all.

Answer 2

I don’t have breasts. Ok, in all seriousness, when I look up how much breasts weigh all I get in answers like “30,000 bees per bong” and all my female friends don’t know the answer. Could removing breasts reduces someone’s weight enough to make human powered flight easier?

The medical name for this is "bilateral mastectomy", and if you google that term you'll find plenty of information about the real-life consequences. They include:

• Scarring. (Breast tissue is flexible, scar tissue ain't.)
• Pain/nerve damage.
• Reduced range of arm/shoulder movement.
• Risk of infection.

As Tim B has already pointed out, the breasts are co-located with the pectoral muscles, so this is pretty much the last place on the body where you want those complications. Any benefits from losing a couple of pounds of tissue will be vastly outweighed by the damage done to the area where the flight muscles are concentrated, and lengthy recovery time before they get back to anywhere near their pre-surgery capability.

Also, would breasts limit the range of arm motion needed to produce a flight stroke?

Mastectomy is more likely to reduce range of mobility than to increase it.

Answer 3

The short answer to your question is breasts would have an insignificant effect on human powered flight in your setting.

Greater bodyweight in general would make muscle-powered flight harder, but even full breasts only weigh about 2 to 5 pounds each. People would just go on a diet for a month to achieve the same effect. Random website about boob weight

Of course a female flyer's breasts would move along with her arm movements, so there wouldn't be a problem there.

A flyer being as lean as possible with a low BMI would be ideal. Since flying is no doubt a very physically demanding aerobic task, your female flyers would probably be slim and muscular anyway, like female Olympic swimmers.

EDIT:

This explanatory chart provides clarification.

Answer 4

Required reading, Titan is the most interesting here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/.

The question seems redundant. If you make somethig lighter it is easier to fly so removing breasts would help.

With the exception of small boobs (which theoretically also have a tiny negative effect on ROM) all boobs would impede flight movement. It would depend on the wings and exact wing motion how much it would be in the way.