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If even the slightest turbulence during a flight causes you to grab the barf sack, you will never want to get on board. Russian machine who uses flapping its wings to take flight. But it does show that Mother Nature’s designs can be oversized to someday revolutionize air travel.
This isn’t the first time we’ve managed to reverse engineer how airborne creatures like insects and birds take flight. In fact, mechanical ornithopters (planes that fly using a flapping wing mechanism) are so common that people have been building resilient versions from balsa wood and paper for years. For $ 40 you can purchase a robotic bird remote control it’s surprisingly handy for a toy. What’s impressive about this contraption called Serenity, which appears to be based on one of the The many sketches of Da Vinci of potential flying machines, is its scale.
The Russian-built ornithopter is proof that an approach to flight with flapping wings is not only an option for small insects or birds whose skeletal structure and body are designed to be as light as possible. With a fuselage that appears to be around 10 feet long, three sets of flapping wings, and all of the mechanisms, links, wires, and batteries needed to create the flapping motion, Serenity is easily heavier than even the largest flying creatures than us. have on Earth. . It doesn’t seem big enough to accommodate a human passenger or pilot yet, but that’s just a matter of scale and funding – future versions of Serenity could be even bigger.
The constant up and down movement of the wings makes it look like Serenity will offer a bumpy ride to anyone trying to get on board, but in the same way birds can keep their heads steady while flapping their wings madly, it doesn’t. no doubt it is a complication that can be overcome with more engineering. But why bother when planes are doing great?
Modern airplanes depend on forward motion to create lift over their wings and stay aloft, which is provided by jet engines or propellers creating thrust – two very noisy solutions. It also means that planes have a minimum speed that they must maintain, otherwise they will stall and fall from the sky. Using the wing movements of an airplane to generate lift opens up incredible maneuverability potential, as anyone who has watched a dragonfly scurrying around hunting mosquitoes, or a hummingbird carefully sipping on a flower can attest. ‘it’s still in flight. Serenity is far from being able to soar through the air, and even her ability to lead is limited, but she does demonstrate exciting potential. Will a Boeing 777 ever flap its giant wings? Probably not, but the flapping of wings is arguably a safer alternative to tying a jet engine to people’s backs as a solution to personal flight.
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