So I’ve started reading the books because of you, and just from how far I’ve gotten into them I can assuredly answer you that no, we’re not getting flight from wings the way it’s presented in the books. There’s a list of largest birds on wikipedia, and all the way at the bottom of the list is the largest bird we believe could fly (now extinct), at somewhere between 40 and 90 pounds. There’s a reference at the bottom of that bird’s article detailing what they know about flight (reference 9).

Unless we decide to lose at least 80% of our average adult weight, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to fly. A very small adult, say someone near 90 lbs, would still need to drop about half while still adding weight from the wings and muscles. The musculature alone for flight takes up a decidedly huge amount of space and weight, and the weight distribution across the body definitely centers low on the abdomen, so it’s even more unlikely that the ‘wings from shoulders’ concept that’s been floating around since ancient times could happen.

From my own experience in skydiving, paragliding, and a little hang gliding, the minimum amount of square footage you’d need to even glide would be pretty large, somewhere around 60 sq. ft is where we sort of bottom out right now in skydiving parachutes. The smallest ever (a pretty cool read) is 34 sq ft., and that took an incredible amount of training and skill. Quite honestly, anything under 150 sq. ft. is considered high performance, and isn’t recommended to people without years of training, so we’d have to start people with very, very large wings (even assuming wiggle room from the differences between a parachute wing and a real wing). The 13 foot wingspan wings mentioned for max would have to be at least wider/taller than the 6.5 feet each wing would extend outwards from the back to get reasonable square footage.

I’m not trying to be negative here, so imagining how we could do it? Something like foldable fabric/frames to get a hang gliding setup, with some small source of thrust. It could totally be possible to fold up a decent hang glider into a pretty small package that you fit yourself into, and then pull out an engine.