Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Insect Flight - insight

This article gives good information about the insect flight:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_flight

Understand that basically there are 2 types of insect flights:
a) Direct
b) Indirect

Dragon flies are from very long time ago.. probably longer than dinosaurs.

Reynolds number (Re) - need to look further into this.
Re ranges from 10 (low turbulance - small insects) to 10000 (high turbulance - large insects)

Insects range from .02g to 3g (grams)
mass is directly poportional to wing area
mass is inversly proportinal to beat frequency

needs more reading....

Insect Flight

As everyone says birds body is well suited for flying and human body is not suitable, it made me think that it would be difficult to attempt at human flight. However, reading more about insect flight has given me more confidence that a human flight is possible and answer lies in understanding or replicating the flying techiniques of an insect.
Like human body, the insect's body is also not suited for flight. Also, if one looks closely the wings are also in proportion with their body length. Also, the wing loading much higher in comparision to a bird, which means that smaller wings would suffice. This gives me more confidence that if an attempt is made then for sure at some point the human flight is possible. Even though that though might look like a distant dream, I am condifent that humans have advanced leaps and bounds in technology. Only an integrated effort is needed to put all the things in place.
However, as I am reading more about insect's flight i am realing that humans have not yet fully understood the insect's flight. There needs to be a proper research done in this area.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Slow Motion Pigeon Flight

This picture shows the slow motion flight of a pigeon taken from my house.
It includes, take off, vertical flight and landing

full screen video can be watched at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2EUmOASOLs