Bird flight as a model 2 Sketches by Leonardo da Vinci Etienne-Jules Marey's cinematographic recording of a bird in flight An airship in combination with an aircraft, by Santos-Dumont Being able to fly like a bird is an age-old dream of mankind. Whetherit be Icarus andDaedalus from Greekmythology,Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance era or Otto and Gustav Lilienthal around 1900: the desire to be able to fly is a vision that has constantly motivated many people to intensively investigate avian flight. These research and development processes have repeatedly given rise to flying machines that imitate the flight of a bird. In our times,someprojects,suchastheOrnithopterofProfessor Dr.James DeLaurier from the University of Toronto, set out to realise a flapping-wing drive mechanism capable of bearing a man aloft. For Festo, fascination with moving air is a driving force for the future – not only in pneumatics, its core competence field, but also far beyond. Leonardo da Vinci constructed the first flapping-wing models in 1490 to come a step closer to realising this ancient dream of mankind. Etienne-Jules Marey, who lived from 1830 to 1904, carried out the first scientific investigations into the movement of living creatures. It was his cinematographic films that first made possible the study of individual motion sequences. In 1889, Otto Lilienthal published the book “Bird flight as the foundation of the art of flying; a contribution to the systematics of flight technology”. Countless tests and analyses carried out by Otto Lilienthal together with his brother Gustav Lilienthal gave rise to a large number of hang-gliders, flapping-wing models and the first scientific measurements in the field of aeronautics. In the chapter “The bird as a model” Otto Lilienthal describes in detail the flight of seagulls. In 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont combined lighter-than-air balloon flight and aviation in France. In balloon flight, buoyancy is provided by a carrier gas, e.g. hydrogen, helium, superheated steam or hot air, in an enclosed space. Aviation makes use of the dynamic lifting force generated by air flowing at different speeds across the underside and the curved upper surface of a wing. Alberto Santos-Dumont mounted an aircraft named “14-bis” be-neath his dirigible Airship No.14. In the early days of aviation, such hybrid constructions had the advantage that the lifting force produced by the flowing air was only required to bear a portion of the overall load; the remaining load was borne by the dirigible airship. These hybrid constructions were susceptible to variations in wind conditions and proved difficult to steer.
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