I recently had an article published on one of my favourite subjects – why winged four legged creatures don’t really work.
You can read the whole article here
As part of the peer review process other people read your article and send back comments as to how it could be improved. One such comment was a link to a document that reviewed ten flying creatures. The issue being that I had not mentioned any of these creatures in my article.
The issue was – they didn’t fly. In the words of Buzz Lightyear – they fell with style.
When it comes to the anatomy of flight, I was concentrating on the limb structure and the mechanics of moving those limbs up and down to create lift and how those muscles and bones affected the others limbs and also, rather importantly, breathing. This, to me, was flight. Large skin flaps between your limbs that allowed you to glide, or fins that allowed you to soar above the water, or limbs that allowed you to glide down from tall structures did not count and I ended up being quite dogmatic about what I meant as flight.
It appears that when you get into flight with a moveable wing, we are not so sure about how it works. In the article there is a link to a you tube video where a flight researcher openly admits he isn’t sure about the mechanics.
A fixed wing that allows a differential in air pressure to be created and creates lift is not, for the purpose of this article, flight. I’ll ponder that tomorrow as I prepare to fall with style at the airport.
