Birds give a lesson to plane designers
You all know that most species of animals can fly -- but not humans. There are more than a million species of flying insects, but do you know that among the 13,000 warm-blood vertebrate species (which include birds and mammals), about 10,000 of them are able to fly (9,000 birds and 1,000 bats)? Many of them have millions of years of experience, and aerospace engineers are trying to learn from birds, bats and insects to design very efficient micro flapping-wing aircraft for the U.S. Air Force to be used as surveillance tools. Natural flyers are much more efficient than man-made aircraft, states one aerospace engineer at the University of Michigan (U-M), who adds that 'natural flyers obviously have some highly varied mechanical properties that we really have not incorporated in engineering.' But read more...
