Flapping flight is the most common form of travel on Earth. It is used by about two-thirds of the creatures that inhabit our planet. But flapping wings for humans still remain an unfulfilled dream. The task of creating a flywheel turned out to be incredibly difficult. So does it make sense to spend energy on the development of such an exotic aircraft? Should we compete with birds?
AIRPLANE IS GOOD, AND AIRLINE IS BETTER
The globe is home to at least nine thousand species of birds and about one and a half million species of insects. Among them there are unimportant flyers, but there are also virtuoso record holders. For example, a sparrow is a slug among birds. Its speed is only about 20 kilometers per hour. The carrier pigeon flies faster. In one hour he can overcome 60 kilometers. But the swift, the best flyer among birds, is more than one hundred and forty.
The bird flies calmly - one speed. Escapes from the enemy - the flight speed increases sharply. The famous peregrine falcon, the personification of bird prowess, noticing prey on the ground, dives from a height at a speed of more than 350 kilometers per hour! I myself saw how once this formidable aerial predator circled for a long time over the forest, and then, folding its wings, suddenly rushed down and, almost touching the tops of the trees, soared abruptly into the sky.
Only at the dawn of aviation could birds overtake the "air stacks" of those years. Then, and pretty soon, the situation changed. Airplanes began to fly faster, higher and further than birds.
Monino. Central Air Force Museum. Flylet "Letatlin" designed by V. Ye. Tatlin - an aircraft with flapping wings, 1932. Rather an art object than something useful and actually working.
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This is all true. But here are other facts. Flapping wings are capable of creating a lift force five to six times greater than stationary, aircraft. A machine with flapping wings will be able to surpass an airplane in efficiency by one and a half, two times, and a helicopter by six, nine times. Apparently, this is what allows birds to make their amazing, ultra-long flights.
Lapwings fly over the Atlantic Ocean without landing. Such a journey is hundreds of thousands of flaps of wings. According to ornithologists, lapwings, with a favorable wind, cover a distance of 3,500 kilometers in one day. The flight of small songbirds across the Sahara desert will last 30-40 hours. And also without intermediate landings.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN'S FLYER
No, not a poet, but another Pushkin, Alexander Nikolaevich, our contemporary, engineer and talented inventor. He lives and works in St. Petersburg. By his own admission, he gave half of his fifty years to flies.
He began to dream about the sky as a child, he loved to watch the flight of birds. When he himself began to fly on hang-gliders, he “felt with his back” that it was impossible to set a strict, rigid flapping algorithm for flapping wings, that “there are not and cannot be even two identical flaps. You have to adjust to flapping flight every second, adjust, feel the air."
So an idea was born in his head, which, as Alexander Pushkin convinced, would finally allow him to solve a centuries-old problem, to create a manned flies.
The idea is that human flapping flight is possible only with adaptive control. In other words, to fly with flapping wings, you need to know how to flap them. It is necessary to merge with the machine, its wings should become an extension of the pilot's hands.
Everyone watched how the bird changed the flapping of its wings, changing their frequency and amplitude. In the flies created earlier, the wings, connected to the motor by a mechanical transmission, a connecting rod-crank mechanism, wave stupidly - monotonously, in no way taking into account the fragility of the air environment and the pilot's intentions.
THIS SHOULD LEARN
“The control system of a real flapping flight,” Pushkin asserts, “should be locked on to the pilot, using all his sensory capabilities, muscular sense, vestibular apparatus, and intuition. After all, the flight environment - the air ocean - is absolutely unpredictable, everything changes every second: wind, vertical currents, air density … To fly in such chaos, you need to directly "feel" the flaps of wings, fluctuations of the environment - and instantly react to them."
In a word, flying on flapping wings is by no means a mechanical process. It is akin to a great art that still needs to be learned, like we learn to walk, ride a bicycle or a skateboard. Why, chicks, having matured, do not immediately begin to fly, and they also learn.
Of course, a person's own strength is not enough for flight. It became clear long ago. In nature, there are no flying creatures weighing more than 15-16 kilograms. The law, according to which the power required for flight, rapidly increases with the increase in the size and weight of the apparatus, interferes.
Pushkin - for a pneumatic drive with flapping wings, a light, simple and obedient engine. Control should be placed on the pilot's fingers. By pressing the buttons of the valves, he will, at will, as appropriate, change the frequency and amplitude of flaps.
Aleksandr Nikolaevich, having worked through dozens of variants of the flywheel device, so far settled on the most, in his opinion, optimal. He received a patent for his flywheel. The well-known NGO "Robotics and Technical Cybernetics" managed to get interested in the invention.
In four months, a model of a flywheel was built with a wingspan of three meters and a weight of 10 kg, it is three times less than a real machine should be.
This model with red and yellow wings was not intended for flights, only for working out the structure. But the flightless she made a huge impression and it was not without reason that she was awarded two gold medals at technical exhibitions.
We managed to find sponsors. The construction of a full-size flywheel began. Unfortunately, it was not possible to complete the work. Sponsors have cooled to her. The idea of adaptive management is finding supporters. Moscow engineer Boris Dukarevich, an ardent supporter of this idea, also developed a project for a flywheel.
Alexander SEDOV