Since you're taking your sweet, trecherous time, I'm posting my own theory:
Minecraft characters have wings. Not elytra, their own attached wings. As [user avatar="https://cravatar.eu/helmavatar/Ajroets/74.png" name="Ajroets"]10733867[/user] said in his post on the pikeman/gundabad thread, elytra is just a cover up, a shell, to hide wings beneath. So in my theory, elytra provides just enough support for the wings that they can get "activated". I'm assuming it's air-tight, but that could make more problems with it. But yeah, wings are probably affected by oxygen, or whatever kind of air is in MC. Probably bad quality since no one but mutants (testificates) lives there. Although there are animals and spiders. I don't know, probably oxygen.
Which just made me remember something new.
Since oxygen is provingly killing us, what if the infestations in MC are based on that? But yeah, it's a bit farfetched.