Natural and Artificial Flying Machines

Abstract

The advent of fossil fuel engines offered aeronautical engineers ten-fold to hundred-fold increases in power-to- gross-weight ratios over the ratios available for biologically powered flight creations such as birds and human powered aircraft. The tremendous achievements of engine powered aircraft over the past eight decades have tended to obscure how numerous flight problems had already been elegantly solved by birds, many tens of millions of years ago. Recent projects in human-powered aircraft, in bird aerodynamics and in the development of a flying replica of an 11 meter span pterodactyl have introduced us to the bird-airplane interface. The result has been an increasing respect for "Mother Nature the Engineer," who derived elegant and satisfactory evolutionary solutions for all the factors involved in biological flight. In many respects, engineers and scientists still have much to learn from nature regarding aeroelasticity employed to tailor structures to the varied demands of flight, active control technology, boundary layer
control, navigation, etc.