ornithopter
What is it? As the article says, it’s an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings, deriving its lift and thrust from its wings instead of just the lift, as in traditional aircraft.
It’s interesting that throughout most of human history wing flapping was thought to be the best way to achieve flight. It’s how birds fly, sure, but using that logic we would probably arrive at the conclusion that a better way to move about on the ground would be to create some giant ambulatory machine instead of just using wheels. So in retrospect it’s amazing to me that humanity took as long as it did to figure out that wing flapping wasn’t going to work.
That said, once we figured out aerodynamics, in the wake of the Wright Brothers and other pioneers, we were able to crack the problem a little bit. Ornithopters have been made and even flown with human power, with varying degrees of success. As an aside, they even made their way into science fiction, playing a prominent role in Dune, which I read recently.
What brings all this to mind? Luke received a Dragonfly remote-control ornithopter toy for Christmas. I assembled it and tried it out in the yard a week or two ago. It terrifies Luke to no end, but it’s actually pretty cool. The four wings provide both lift and thrust and it steers using a miniature tail rotor, kind of like a helicopter. It’s supposedly able to fly both indoors and outdoors, but the state of my skill is such that it’s exclusively an outdoor toy at the moment. The wings even make a rapid whikka-whikka-whikka noise that increases in frequency with wing speed.
Thinking about ornithopters as imitative of birds reminds me of a scenario that used to come to mind more often when I was in the midst of pilot training. I imagined a conversation between myself in the airplane and a bird. As a means of achieving flight, I would expound on the superiority of the airplane, its speed, range, capacity and all the rest. And the bird would respond by simply saying, “But I’m free.” And it’s true. For all of our exploits in air and in space, and even in other areas, almost everything we do is by extension; our physical capabilities as humans are ridiculously small in comparison. If we didn’t have our minds (and opposable thumbs) we wouldn’t have much at all.