Birds Give a Lesson to Plane Designers

Roland Piquepaille points out a news release from the University of Michigan where researchers are looking to birds and bats for insights into aerospace engineering. Wei Shyy and his colleagues are learning from solutions developed by nature and applying them to the technology of flight. A presentation on this topic was also given at the 2005 TED conference. From the news release: "The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second. Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G. Flapping flight is inherently unsteady, but that's why it works so well. Birds, bats and insects fly in a messy environment full of gusts traveling at speeds similar to their own. Yet they can react almost instantaneously and adapt with their flexible wings."

Comments

It's the people, not the planes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Current aircraft performance is limited by what the occupants can survive. Try to roll a human at 5,000 degrees per second and things would get messy.

Re:It's the people, not the planes.

[clarkkent09]

The planes they are talking about have "wingspans smaller than a deck of playing cards". You won't fit too many people on that.

This is something people at universities mess about all the time. I've seen programs about something like this on the science channel or whatever years ago. They had little artificial insects or small birds with cameras on them flying around. Wasn't there news story about them being used by the police to film some demonstrations last year? For reasons known only to himself, Roland decided to pick this particular random news release and make it sound as if its some important new breakthrough when its nothing of the sort.

Missing tag.

[palegray.net]

Where's the "ohnoitsroland" meta tag? :) Seriously, though...

The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second. I'm no physics buff, but doesn't this have something to do with the greatly diminished surface area and related physical stresses on the swallow? Anyone with some aeronautics background care to help me out?

Re:Missing tag.

[pipatron]

Who programmed that navigation system into its miniature brain?

No one.

No gradual processes over time can work here.

Why not?

The FIRST plover setting out has to make it

No.

because plovers can't swim.

Irrelevant.

no matter what the weather

The weather is most probably quite similar since they travel at the same time each year.

the amount of fuel a plover carries mandates that the individual bird would crash into the ocean about 800 miles short of its destination

If it was longer, it would carry more fat, and vice versa.

since they fly in flocks, in formation, only the lead bird has the full wind resistance load

They learnt to fly in flocks long before they started to do crazy 2500 mile migrations.

All this had to work the very first time.

Again, no. The first flocks that set out at random either end up in the ocean, or find land. Those that find land will do this because they had enough food to do this. If each bird in the flock that found land had a random amount of fat, half of them would drop to the ocean, but half would arrive and breed. They would get kids that had genes that would make them eat a little bit more than the imaginary kids from the birds that died. Now repeat for millions of generations, and you'll end up with something quite optimized.

Birds and insects are puny

[backslashdot]

I hate commenting on another annoying stupid Roland article.

Birds and insects have very low mass. As mass increases components have deal with more stress etc.

Post another annoying stupid Roland article when birds flying at high speeds weigh as much as an aircraft (or even a human) and then we'll see how they handle things.

Btw, I could have sworn i saw the "ohnoitsroland" tag and then it disappeared .. what's up with that?

Re:PILOTS are limited to 8-10 G's not the planes.

[fahrbot-bot]

In addition, a bird's head is inline with its body, while pilots sit up and require g-suits to force blood back up into their heads. I wonder what forces the pilots could withstand if they piloted in a prone position, though I can't imagine that being very comfortable.

Oh, no, Roland the Plogger is back

[Animats]

Sometimes they come back.

Roland is off in bogosity land, as usual. The wingspan of a barn swallow is about 0.3m. The wingspan of an A-4 Skyhawk is 8.1m, which is 27x larger. So, scaled for size, an A-4 Skyhawk actually has about 4x the roll rate of a sparrow.

Historically, aircraft that looked or worked like birds have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Little ornithopter UAVs do work, but the ornithopter concept does not scale up well.