Aircraft inspired by pterodactyl
This freaky pterodactyl's head crest is inspiring a novel aircraft design with a vertical fin on its head. Texas Tech University paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee and aerospace engineer Richard Lind of the University of Florida, are working on designs for small autonomous aircraft that use a head rudder to steer. From Discovery.com:
The pterosaur's head crest is like having the tail at the front of the plane, Lind said. As the animal turned its head, it could execute drastic, sharp turns, making it incredibly agile.Crested Pterodactyl Inspires Aircraft Design (via The Anomalist)
"It's really good for turn radius and tracking prey while it flies," he said...
"...The military is interested in having aircraft that can fly down into cities between buildings, avoiding wires and stuff like that," (University of Maryland aerospace engineer Sean) Humbert said. "This is a good design if you want to do crazy acrobatic maneuvers."
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Great example of dinosaurs and humans coexisting with, and inspiring each other.
I was going to say something like "if a head flap was a good aerodynamics design choice, pterodactyls wouldn't have gone extinct", but then I remembered that airplanes don't flap their wings, either.
Hmm - "small autonomous aircraft".
Turns out it was 50 years ago last week that the first AIM-9 air-to-air missile was used in combat - September 24, 1958.
It's small, autonomous, and uses forward control vanes (rudders in all directions?) to help it in 'tracking prey while it flies'.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder )
can skydivers steer in freefall with a helmet crest?
Or is that a neck breaker?
IIRC, Fusion Man steers with his head.
@4, It seems like it would have to be a pretty big crest. I'm not a sky diver, but I've seen video of jumpers with helmet cams. The drag doesn't seem to be so forceful as to cause problems.
I assume a large crest would require strong neck muscles though.
But as I said, INASD.
The late Paul MacCready built a flying pterodactyl model in cooperation with the Smithsonian in the 1980's and was the first to determine the head-vane's use as a control system.
Some technical details here: http://www.twitt.org/QNStory.html
Paul MacCready once made a... Dang it Thinkerer!
Any forward-mounted flat surface (such as canards, the forward fins in guided bombs and missiles, the chines of a Blackbird and X-45, etc) has a de-stabilizing effect. But this can be easily overcome when the rear-mounted surfaces are bigger or set further aft. As Burt Rutan will tell you, it's easy to increase overall efficiency that way, and as Eurofighter and Dassault and Saab and Sukhoi will tell you, you can make the airplane more agile. Especially when it's an all-moving surface (so you don't just have a flat thing sitting there trying to push the nose away from the direction of flight whenever there is any sideslip) and when you have a fly-by-sire system or at least a rudimentary sensor-actuator system to turn then surface into the wind when there is sideslip - something that animals do intuitively anyways. So basically you can set it up so that the instability effects are minimal but the enhanced agility is noticeable. Probably not something your average airline or bizjet passenger would want, but to make abrupt turns (especially in UAVs) forward-mounted surfaces can be ideal.
Fly-by-sire systems being the ancient feudal predecessors of fly-by-wire, naturally.
Forward canards when large enough to contribute to total lift, as in Ritan's planes, increase safety. The canards are usually designed to stall before the main wing, which drops the nose preventing the main wing from stalling.
Re: #2 (GATO) - Extinction can be caused by many things. Tapejara was very well-"designed" for its ecological niche, as it appears in the fossil record for about as long as most species. Its eventual extinction very likely had nothing to do with its head-crest.
Ah, like the Rocketeer - always liked that helmet of his.
This thing is going to fly like a rock. Believe it or not I am a specialist in pterosaur flight and have actually published papers on how the head crests operate in flight - they don't help steer believe it or not. Oh, and MacCready's model was interesting, but very un-pterosaur like which is why it was able to fly. Yes this was a long time ago and the technology has advanced significantly, but you can't just build a pterosaur like that. Plenty have tried and all have failed (look up the recetn Stanford pterosaur project). This thing will simply not work, and if it does, it will be becuase it looks or operates very little like we know pterosaurs did.
As for the comments on the neck, pterosaurs had special joints in the vertebrae to prevent torsion and undue motion - the necks were actually very stiff to prevent catastroptic failure during gusts or turns. Our experiments have shown however, that even very large crests (and T. wellnhoferi is TINY next to T. navigens or T. imperator) have no real effect on turning or stabilistaion.