Abstract
The advent of fossil-fuel engines has provided aeronautical engineers with a ten-fold to hundred-fold increase 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 the fact that 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 a 11-m span pterodactyl have introduced us to the bird-airplane interface. The result has been an increasing respect for “Mother Nature the Engineer,” who derived efficient evolutionary solutions for all of the factors involved in biological flight. Engineers and scientists also have much to learn from nature regarding aeroelasticity as a factor in tailoring structures to the varied demands of flight, including active-control technology, boundary-layer control, and navigation.
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© 1988 Spring-Verlag
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MacCready, P.B. (1988). Natural and artificial flying machines. In: Coles, D. (eds) Perspectives in Fluid Mechanics. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 320. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0021116
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0021116
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