Should We Care about how Birds Fly?

Abstract

Bird flight has intrigued human minds ever since the Stone Age. Paintings in Lascaux cave in France are considered the oldest representation of birds in flight made by early ancestors of humans. The ability to fly has been interpreted as a divine power by some cultures which proceeded to include wings in drawings and sculptures of their deities. In the Renaissance period, Polymaths like Leonardo Da Vinci studied birds and their motion in detail. His codex of birds mentions the objective of this study as to develop a human-powered flying machine. Even, the Wright brothers used warping wings in their flight tests mimicking the flight patterns of birds. The wing and fuselage design of fixed-wing aircraft from the earliest versions to modern jet-powered airliners is directly inspired by the bio-mechanics of large birds. However, with the success of fixed-wing aircraft, the flapping wing concepts saw declining interest as a viable design option for air vehicles. During this time, the aerodynamics of bird wings was only studied in fundamental science to answer the questions on their aerodynamic performance. However, the popularization of Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) renewed the interest in bird-inspired air vehicles with flapping wings as a possible design.