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Studies In Ornithopters
weileong writes "This should be of especial interest to fans of Frank Herbert's Dune (or maybe only those who preferred House Atreides) - a genuine, flexible, flapping-capable winged aircraft (by which I don't mean passenger-carrying. Yet.) has been produced by the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies and SRI International (Washington Post article, free reg required). Advantages include everything from low speed control to efficiency. Once these things really hit "real world" usage, the V-22 Osprey really HAS no reason to exist (and all the army personnel at risk of dying in one should rejoice)."
Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?
"centuries of evolution have produced structures and systems that work very well." Centuries of evolution on Earth have produced structures and systems that work very well on Earth. People have spent decades, possibly centuries, developing flapping-wing vehicles that, even now, barely fly on Earth, and someone wants to send them to Mars in 6 years (2009)? I think a sailplane-like vehicle would still be much more effective.
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Maybe they don't want to produce it because of pressure from the U.S.
Dare I say Avro Arrow?
The Avro Arrow was a plane produced by Canada that was years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, because of the immense pressure from the U.S. (they didn't want Canada to sell the technology to other countries), the project got shut down.
Yes, there's a little more to it than that, but that's the basic jist.
Read more about the Avro Arrow and the politics behind it at wikipedia.
Ornithopters do and will work. Materials fatigue, control issues, mechanical design, aerodynamic optimization are are solvable problems. Flapping flight exploits some important aerodynamic properties that provide much higher lift than is possible with fixed wings with steady-flow. Unsteady flow aerodynamics explains the very successful flight abilities of the Bumblebee, despite the assumption-laden proofs against this fuzzy little nectar collecter.
But whether ornithopers will ever carry humans in any quantity is doubtful because the ride will, to say the least, be sickeningly bumpy. The unsteady flows over the flapping wings mean cyclic forces on the fuselage and cyclic accelerations for the passengers. The ride will be much much worse than that of a helicopter and more like the ride in a small boat riding a very rough swell. Other flapping organism don't mind the vibration and cyclic motion of flight as they are evolved to tolerate it. In contrast the human propioception system will definitely hurl when subjected to the "graceful" up and down motion of a large-scale flapping machine.
Ornithopters will make really cool recon drones, whether over battlefields or Mars, but they will make horrible passenger vehicles
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Intercept Technologies also has a working ornithopter. It was featured on TechTV, and a number of other places earlier this year. It looks a lot cooler too ;)
http://www.intercept-technologies.com/index2.html
These are small military machines. Their purpose is to enhance our ability to kill people that piss us off.
The martian exploration stuff is flim flam, because, as they themselves say, this is about the most inefficient way we could possible devise of flying about. Efficient flying animals hardly flap their wings at all. In contrast Hummingbirds drink eighty seven times their own weight in a cocktail of cocaine and Red Bull each day just to stay alive. And if you're not sure of my grasp of mathematics or biology there, consider that the alternative is believing someone who says "centuries of evolution have produced structures and systems that work very well".
Ornithopters are essentially cool-but-useless at the human scale. Yes, everyone said the Wright brothers were crazy too, but the thing is, the Wright brothers looked at ways of improving on the results of (literally hundreds of years of!) random evolution. Merely mimicking it just seems to produce a lot of problems, and fixing them appears to give a solution that's worse than what we already have.
Good luck to the people that get to play with these, but really, we should just stick to the much more credible miniature black helicopters.
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