Should Airplanes Look Like Birds?

Should airplanes look more like birds? That was a question posed at a meeting of engineers and scientists in Long Beach, California, yesterday. "Yes," was the answer, for a number of reasons--not the least of which was that it could make our planes more energy efficient.

In the way that academics are sometimes able to do, a pair of engineers set aside all commercial and economic concerns and asked themselves the question, what design would be most aerodynamic? Erasing from their memory the generic tube-and-wings format we have up in the sky today, the researchers experimented with a series of other designs (including a pure, bodiless wing), and concluded that an airplane with a small tail--like a bird--would minimize drag, improving fuel efficiency.

"The most important point is that we may be wasting large amounts of fossil fuel by flying in fundamentally sub-optimal aircraft designs," said one of the researchers, USC's Geoffrey Spedding, in a release. "At the very least, we can show that there exists an alternative design that is aerodynamically superior."

Spedding and his colleague's suggestion was one-upped by a presentation that envisioned aircraft resembling hummingbird. Hummingbirds are oddities among birds--their wings don't simply flap up and down, but oscillate in a sort of figure-eight pattern. They are able to maintain the necessary lift to hover by creating a whirling mass of air that sustains them.

At the Long Beach meeting, a team of academic, government, and commercial researchers announced that they had built a robotic hummingbird to more closely study how the animal performs its aviation feats. Soon, they plan to test the robotic hummingbird under high-wind conditions, with an eye towards creating a new "ornithopter"--a bird-inspired aircraft--that could hover in place for surveillane operations.

Together, the two bits of research bring us closer to two age-old human dreams--to live amicably with the earth, and to fly by flapping goofy mechanical wings.

[Image: Flickr user Tessa Farrell]