That makes sense, as the few successful real-life ornithopters worked better once in the air that they did trying to get off the ground. They seem to need that extra push to get airborne.

Read an article that said one of the few places in the Solar System where an ornithopter might be practical is Titan; dense atmosphere, low gravity; but the problem of making a flexing wing system that would work in that kind of cold might be insurmountable.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort