I can imagine an ornithopter working as a really tiny insect sized drone designed to infiltrate buildings. I cannot imagine it working as a normal sized drone or even aircraft due to air density, mechanical stress and gravity.
@@JDubzDrumzWhat conventional/fixed wing aircraft can fly a near record distance? If the wingspan/surface area is extended, wouldn't that maximize the glide period? I would think the advantage of the ornithopter is steering. Maybe it doesn't need flaps or something like that.
@@smithtorreysmith one being able to read a four syllable word in the right order of syllables when it's the name of the topic of a youtube video one is making is not a high bar.
@@tangow371 tbf any VTOL is going to have way more moving parts than something that just flies normal. Much less a tilt rotor. Only so much you can trim
Actually - a flapping motion has much less open spaces than a rotating one. It's actually quite better in sandy conditions than anything rotor or tilt rotor based.
Modern ornithoper prototypes in lab settings do actually appear to offer superior efficiency to propeller driven aircraft in certain situations, like at lower airspeeds. I don't know if their testing methodology is completely bulleproof because ornithopters are a really weird mix of biology and aero engineering and judging their effectiveness without a very sound understanding of both is hard, but their performance is at least comparable. The real advantage appears to be that you can achieve similar performance to a fixed wing prop plane while also being able to take off and land vertically.
@@jerrymartin7019 you mean like if everything is set to the opposite so less efficient means more efficient then yeah ok i agree, also you have herd of a helicopter or a V 22 osprey right? if not, these 2 aircraft can also take off and land vertically, id also like to add that if it were possible for birds to have propellers they would because it just makes more sence
Alternate reality where young Prince Napoleon and his mother escape to the Algerian desert in one of these, to lead the locals in a fight against his ancient enemy, House Hohenzollern.
the problem with these type of aircraft is a dragonfly doesn't scale nicely. We as human's weren't destined to fly, and lifting our weight into the sky takes a lot of effort. Thats why propelling hundreds of us im metal tubes needs a pair or two of big engines to do so. The mechanics of an ornothopter just doesn't scale. theres lots of moving parts that can easily break down either from metal fatigue or simple failures such as a busted linkage etc. Plus it would be a horrificly uncomfortable ride; with all that vibration being mechanically linked to the fuselage.
100% my thoughts. Scaleability is always the biggest hurdle. + how do you steer it? how do you even create lift with it just flapping up and down. Pretty sure a dragonfly can also rotate it a little in the axis n stuff. Biology is complicated and introducing so many moving parts its just inefficient.
Could see this as a real craft used by special forces in military, IF it can be made like the one in Dune, but cant see it ever being used as a passenger airplane
@@elmeril2203 Imagine being a soldior in the thing though. Those wings beating up and down, transversing from up stroke to down stroke (to actually generate any useful lift) would make for a very uncomfortable ride! I'd rather spemd my time snoozing in a C130 than being shaken half to death in a flappy plane :)
Exactly, this design at the scale in this movie will never happen. Too complex, materials that can't take the insane fatigue cycles, the need for extreme vibration cancelling measures. It's ridiculous especially when other flying craft designs could accomplish the same or better flight with less complexity and greater reliability.
Maybe it's a reference to National Lampoon's Doon, where they call it an "orthodontothopter". Too bad not enough people know about this awesome little parody book.
Flapping or oscillating Wings on aircraft are like legs on land vehicles. We know how they ought to work, but we do not know how to make them survive working or power them to operate them for a useful amount of time.
You’d be surprised by how many crazy French designs made it into today’s day to day life, to the point we don’t even think about it. From the jet engine, designed early last century when airplanes where made out of wood and fabric and that today powers airliners and fighter jets, to the statoreactor (ramjet), the pulsoreactor that powered the V1s, the quadrocopter that today everybody flies under the form of drones, the automobile, etc…
I think they'll make a come back. They clearly work but now we have the solid state autopilot and stability control systems to make it work as well as high power electric motors for control of wing flapping, articulation and warping. They will be VTOL and very quiet.
@@williamzk9083 not sure about that, they would be less efficient, a lot more stress on the moving parts and who knows how loud it would be because there isn't a full scale working version
@@williamzk9083 Energy efficiency and the ridiculously high inertial forces at the wings with every direction change at this speed negate your idea Thats why you dont see this on larger animals.
@@alphadawg81 pterodactyls with wing spans of 10n/33ft and 250kg flew and leaped into the air. Only minimal Stresses would be involved. The inertia of the gentle downwards propulsive beat is arrested by aerodynamic lift itself. The wing then twist and rises gently under its own lift till at the top of the stroke when it descended da again. There would be no huge forces at the shoulder Joint
Bone would be Ossis or Osteo as präfix. Ortho means straight or correct. Pteron is the wing , dont ask about the ino^^ Now imagine again what that would be. A normal plain ;)
the biggest benefit of elastic wing tip is that airbus don't have to pay extra for extra wide terminal. The price gone through the roof even if you wing span a few feet too wide. A lot design consideration end up need to accommodating airport pricing instead of pure aerodynamic performance.
Pairs of counterbalanced "fixed-blade" wings, which oscillate upon a desmodromically driven crankshaft, will be more efficient both mechanically and in terms of weight, and will be substantially more manageable/reliable/durable, than a hinged or split wing ornithopter. Utilizing greater quantities of smaller wings and an additional axis of oscillation should further improve effective output, as the winglets form a larger "dynamically ducted" wing, and reduce losses to aerodynamic drag by "slicing" upwards into the air, and "beating" downwards against the air.
or you're totally wrong and wings actually work worse in air agitated by other wings ahead of them... which is what real life aircraft and racing cars' spoilers show to be the case. 😒 ornithopter wings certainly do need to change pitch or be flexible to change pitch by yielding to air resistance, more on the upstroke, which seems to be one of the things you're suggesting, without that, an ornithopter is entirely hopeless. insects generally fly that way, as do hummingbirds (the latter are the flying animals most easily replicated in simple hovering flight by ornithopters). some birds and I think more so bats fly mostly in a sort of butterfly stroke swimming like motion that involves complex folding of the wings to pull them forward, which would be very difficult to replicate. and many like small songbirds actually use a really strange looking standard flying pattern in which they flap a few strokes to propel up and forward, then tuck their wings in and arc a bit up and then down again like a little torpedo, so they bounce up and down. ai reckon it's probably an adaptation that they're evolved to basically do for fun, while it serves the evolutionary purpose of being more difficult for a surprise attack from an aerial predator like a falcon to hit them.
Between this ornithopter and the exaggerated tumblehome design of their pre-dreadnought warships, I have concluded that France is a Jules Verne fever dream.
it'd be basically the Thunderscreech all over again, except instead of a single (quite short, stout and rigid) propeller moved by a double engine connected to a single shaft, it'd be four independent wings with either two or four engines on a crank to move the wing up and down. Forget the vibrations on the wing itself, not sure any sort of engine would be able to withstand the stress of having to move a whole ass wing at basically supersonic speeds without wanting to jump out of the fuselage
There have been a couple of prop driven designs whose propeller tips broke the sound barrier. The engines didn't explode, but the pilots suffered constant severe headaches from being bombarded by dozens of tiny sonic booms all the time.
@@lukedogwalker a single design, the Thunderscreech, and it literally rattled the plane loose after a single hour of flight... assuming the test pilot could withstand the nausea that long
Oh yeah, vibration would **obliterate** those wings in moments. No matter what it's made of. Unless it's self-repairing, it's gonna experience a ton of stress fatigue very quickly
It all started with James Pitts' "Sky Car" vibrating orthotopter umbrella, then the umbrella was closed with a dome and devices appeared according to the scheme of conventional electromagnetic vibrating speakers (membrane + inductance) - fragments of the membrane were found by a farmer in Roswell. Then they created piezoelectric thrusters, or with small dischargers on the surface (they glowed all over the body due to ionization of the air), and now they are planes with plasma propulsion panels (so they are angular - that is, with flat surfaces). Thousands of discharge cells are densely packed into motor panels - they shoot streams of plasma (railgun architecture - coaxial electrodes). The ionized air of the spark discharge is accelerated in the railgun chamber by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. 💥💥💥💥💥
1:35 and no --- there's no way a huge aircraft can fly like a small dragonfly --- air itself behaves different for larger objects and the most doubtful is the wing flapping frequency --- no way the wings would need to flap that frequent as even big birds don't do that
The speed required by the flapping wings at this scale exceeds the speed of sound, which is impossible without breaking those wings. Microscopic drones are, on the other hand, perfectly feasable, imitating dragonflies.
The bird of pray would be cool. But could you imagine the panic of a nervous flyer, with the outer wings of the albatross, and probably why it was named after that bird too. Has the four times 20 living people panic thinking the wings are falling off lol. I would not like to be on it.
Thank you Nick for featuring this video! 🙂👍 I remember asking you while you were in the recent Dubai Air Show if you're going to make a video discussing about the aircraft featured in Dune Films. Dream come true! 👏🙌
I was just reading about the UTIAS Ornithopter recently. The bouncing up and down you mentioned near the end of the video is definitely an issue, especially at takeoff. Wings go down, fuselage lifts up, wings go up, fuselage slams down into the pavement. The landing gear is strong enough to take that, but it still lost a bit of speed every time that happened, which is why they needed to add a (very small) jet engine to finally make it fly. Should be less of an issue with the French one though. Two sets of wings moving in opposite directions would counterbalance each other.
@@FoundAndExplained the way bird flies, it would create too much pressure on the pilot. But if controlled remotely then,it could be useful but the production cost would be a pain.
@@PaulMcElligott Wonky pronunciation, fine, but factual errors? How is that someone's "thing"? That just means they are wrong about things, and their work is not useful to learn things from.
@@BramKaandorp No disagreement from me. This guy butchers names and facts all the time. People call him out, and he laughs it off. Kind of why I don’t watch his videos nearly as much as I used to.
Man i love ur videos and you have rekindled my interest in aviation and other weird things!!! These videos keep me occupied and enthralled for hours on end well done you deserve a subscriber and keep up the good work!!!!
"energy SAVINGS???" Uh, no, No and HELL NO! Do you have any idea how much energy is lost from flapping wings every time they're switching movement direction? Ridiculously much. And the same switch also causes massive force un the wing. Chances are BAD that wings will snap. Just as the French prototype did. And the problems becomes exponentially worse with every increase in size. To have any chance of working beyond micro scale, you also need to figure out how to not lose a huge amount of lift from every upthrust of the wings. Personally, if i wanted something fictional-ish with these kind of abilities? I'd much rather go with Airwolf. At least there, i can sort of figure out how to make it(supersonic helicopter) work in theory even if it's probably impossible in practice.
I would thing rather than flex the wings would twist, on the down stroke they would be flat but on the up stroke the trailing edge would passively twist down, that would have the result of making them act like a propeller on the upstroke but lift on the down stroke. Mechanically this would be simple to implement and would put far less stress on the materials, though it would make it very loud as because the the bearing for the twisting motion would have to have have probably spring loaded stops to limit the movement.
Ornithopter, not Orthonopter... Ornitho- (bird) -pter (wing), which happens to not be a proper description of these as they mimic insect wings, not bird wings, Entomopter would be a more fitting name
For an ornithopter to work, I believe that the solution is not to make the wings go up and down, but to make the wings make movement similar to scooping the air and push it down. Like mosquitos do! Do whatever you want with that information.
As others have said: "Sounds good! Doesn't work." Take a look at the rubber powered toy ornithopers available all around the world. They stay aloft for a fraction of the time that a rubber powered fixed wing toy plane does. Large flexing structures like flapping wings would put large stresses on the aircraft. The flapping mechanism would be far more complex and delicate than a helicopter's rotor's hub. In short it would be an underpowered, overstressed, maintenance nightmare used to duplicate things that we already have working fine. But, it Would look cool in CGI videos...
It all started with James Pitts' "Sky Car" vibrating orthotopter umbrella, then the umbrella was closed with a dome and devices appeared according to the scheme of conventional electromagnetic vibrating speakers (membrane + inductance) - fragments of the membrane were found by a farmer in Roswell. Then they created piezoelectric thrusters, or with small dischargers on the surface (they glowed all over the body due to ionization of the air), and now they are planes with plasma propulsion panels (so they are angular - that is, with flat surfaces). Thousands of discharge cells are densely packed into motor panels - they shoot streams of plasma (railgun architecture - coaxial electrodes). The ionized air of the spark discharge is accelerated in the railgun chamber by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. Just imagine! - tens of thousands of small ramjet engines assembled in panels and launching plasma synchronously at a huge frequency (hundreds of kilohertz). Plasma jets form toroidal air vortices - this air cushion creates lift and acceleration.💥 🕳💥💥💥💥💥💥 💫 💫 💫 💫
The wings would need to twist and flap since a dragonfly or bee fly by creating a low pressure area above the wing it couldn't flyy like a normal airplane. It generates lift in a completely different way.
Someone did the math and the wings of the ornithopters from the Dune movie would be breaking the sound barrier. So each wing would be creating 2 sonic booms in one full cycle and there are at least for wings so that would be one LOUD craft. With all the other problems like material strength and the articulation required it seems so much easier to just use helicopter blades.
In the 60's, we had balsa wood gliders with nose-weights to throw and balsa wood gliders with rubber bands to twist a propellor and store energy, then throw. As an Army Brat, my family was in W. Germany a lot. Toy stores over there had this rubber band-powered cellophane bird that would flap around in the air for a few circles. Pretty cool take on the rubber band-powered flying machine, imho, back then. I guess the toy was basically an ornithopter...
It seems pretty clear to me, and I'm not even an engineer, that the stresses on the wings changing direction so quickly would very quickly break something. Fixed wing aircraft only have the drag on the wing going in the same direction, and rotary wings always rotate in the same direction, so they are not constantly moving in one direction, then the opposite direction, several times per second. For fun, take a tape measure out and move slowly. If you only move it slowly, it will remain rigid, but if you move it faster, it will bend.
The dragonfly is the closest analogy. The main problem is one of mass. The bigger the size the higher the involved masses become, in this case particularly because the length of a wing will speed up the tips very strongly even at low flapping frequencies. It’s a bit like the question why we do not have exoskeletons like insects. We would become incredibly heavy and breathing ducts in stead of lungs would be too inefficient. There simply is a scale limit for such solutions.
Stationary and Rotating airfoils make sense because they maintain a constant direction and a steady resistance. Flapping wings abruptly stop and change direction several times a second. I don’t think there are materials strong enough to withstand that force and the vibration has to be insane. Dragonflies and bees buzz when they fly, imagine the buzz when it weighs a ton or more.
In the nature the biggest flaing creature by rapidly flapping it's wings is Kolibry, other smaller ones are insects. So you there is no way to scale this principals on a scale. The Kolibry is the biggest it can get airborne.
I didn't knew engineers of my own country tried this seriously without the composite material we have today. "We don't have oil, but we have ideas" in practice before this sentence even became a thing.
The vibrations would have it destroyed in seconds. This hilarious Concept wasn't new and in no way functional. Even today with all the computer supported technic it would have more flaws then the infamouse "Triebflügel-Jäger" from Focke-Wulf. Funny to see but c'mmon it's hilarious 😂😂
Guess you missed a point: In Dune exist a technology called „repulsor“ for flight - seen in the air-floating lights or Baron Harkonnens ability to lift himself in the air. Those seem to be used in Ornithopters too
I think we should be thinking more along the lines of check valves for the up stroke and down stroke. Allow air to pass thru the wing on the up stroke but seal in the down. I thing it would be easy to protoype.
Casually observing that bugs' wings flap therefor fly, will never lead to manned flight; one would be better suited to observing a rower to determine flight-mechanics of flapping-wings: pivots on a rigid-wing would only toss the center of gravity repeatedly body-slamming the fuselage on deck. Wings would snap unless they bowed on every stroke, flapping angles would have to be pitched rolled swung and reversed twice per stroke.
At around 12:30... Yes, you struggled, but you managed to pronounce Messerschmitt somewhat right, and you put effort into it. Thanks just for that, attention to detail is noticed, and is why I like your vids so much!
This is not an Ornithopter! From Greek Ornis means 'bird'. An Ornithopter is a device that imitates the flight of a bird. This device imitates the flight of an insect. Therefore it should be called Entomopter!
i feel like having a static wing flip up and down will not be efficient. either have the wing do some kind of fold on the way up to reduce resistance. or have it work like a bee wing that kinda "drills" upwords
I had 2 or 3 RC dragonflies in my childhood days actually, and they could stay in the air as long as i wanted, or even shoot straight up into the sky if i went on full throttle. It was awesome to see them fly using their 4 flapping wings gaining vertical and horizontal thrust at the same time. And oh boy let me tell you those things were maneuverable. :D
Least crazy french design be like:
it works often though the stato reactor (scram jet) are now working technology for exemple
Fo Chauchat (Show-sha the French machine gun).
Chauchat (Show-sha)
😂😂😂😂😂
I see your crazy Frenchman, and raise you One British Submarine with a FIXED 305mm gun
Ever heard about the even crazier Surcouf submarine carrying a plane and 2 turreted guns 😉👍@@treanttrooper6349
I can imagine an ornithopter working as a really tiny insect sized drone designed to infiltrate buildings. I cannot imagine it working as a normal sized drone or even aircraft due to air density, mechanical stress and gravity.
If I'm correct. The wing tips would be super sonic.
This reminded me of the hunter-killer scene in the movie.
Ornithopters can at least scale up to normal drone sized. For example, the various robot birds and bats Festo has made over the last few years.
@@JDubzDrumzI think that he might be referring specifically to the dragonfly style design rather then any design with flapping wings.
@@JDubzDrumzWhat conventional/fixed wing aircraft can fly a near record distance? If the wingspan/surface area is extended, wouldn't that maximize the glide period? I would think the advantage of the ornithopter is steering. Maybe it doesn't need flaps or something like that.
The Baguette must Flow
Ouisan Al Gaib
He who controls frogs, controls Paris
Fre[nch]men
As a frenchman i say hell yeah to that ! 🤣
The oil used to fry the onions.
So it sounds like the orthinopter is a kind of ornithopter.
What tipped you off?
@@LittleManFlying The landing gear.
Let’s not be squares here.
@@smithtorreysmith one being able to read a four syllable word in the right order of syllables when it's the name of the topic of a youtube video one is making is not a high bar.
Stopped at 03::29 to check comments and see if I was only one caugt that!
Carry on, people.
I don't know about you, but when I'm designing a machine I try to include as many moving parts as possible.
V 22 Osprey mechanics: 😰
@@tangow371fantastic they are… 100% problems free , are not.
@@tangow371 tbf any VTOL is going to have way more moving parts than something that just flies normal. Much less a tilt rotor. Only so much you can trim
@@tangow371The Osprey is still magnificient.
Less accidents than happened with either the blackhawk or the Chinook.
Actually - a flapping motion has much less open spaces than a rotating one.
It's actually quite better in sandy conditions than anything rotor or tilt rotor based.
2:00 im pretty sure a normal plane with a propeller would use far less energy than trying to flap 4 big wings at hi speed
Looking at nature, Hummingbirds require insane amounts of sugar to stay alive too. Especially compared to otherwise similar birds that flap normally.
Modern ornithoper prototypes in lab settings do actually appear to offer superior efficiency to propeller driven aircraft in certain situations, like at lower airspeeds. I don't know if their testing methodology is completely bulleproof because ornithopters are a really weird mix of biology and aero engineering and judging their effectiveness without a very sound understanding of both is hard, but their performance is at least comparable. The real advantage appears to be that you can achieve similar performance to a fixed wing prop plane while also being able to take off and land vertically.
@@jerrymartin7019 you mean like if everything is set to the opposite so less efficient means more efficient then yeah ok i agree, also you have herd of a helicopter or a V 22 osprey right? if not, these 2 aircraft can also take off and land vertically, id also like to add that if it were possible for birds to have propellers they would because it just makes more sence
It would but hey
@@discovolante6624Is there a dictionary somewhere with the word "sense" intentionally misspelled? And is it in Texas?
Alternate reality where young Prince Napoleon and his mother escape to the Algerian desert in one of these, to lead the locals in a fight against his ancient enemy, House Hohenzollern.
he is the Baguette al Ghalib
Underrated comment
the problem with these type of aircraft is a dragonfly doesn't scale nicely. We as human's weren't destined to fly, and lifting our weight into the sky takes a lot of effort. Thats why propelling hundreds of us im metal tubes needs a pair or two of big engines to do so. The mechanics of an ornothopter just doesn't scale. theres lots of moving parts that can easily break down either from metal fatigue or simple failures such as a busted linkage etc. Plus it would be a horrificly uncomfortable ride; with all that vibration being mechanically linked to the fuselage.
100% this
100% my thoughts. Scaleability is always the biggest hurdle. + how do you steer it? how do you even create lift with it just flapping up and down. Pretty sure a dragonfly can also rotate it a little in the axis n stuff. Biology is complicated and introducing so many moving parts its just inefficient.
Could see this as a real craft used by special forces in military, IF it can be made like the one in Dune, but cant see it ever being used as a passenger airplane
@@elmeril2203 Imagine being a soldior in the thing though. Those wings beating up and down, transversing from up stroke to down stroke (to actually generate any useful lift) would make for a very uncomfortable ride! I'd rather spemd my time snoozing in a C130 than being shaken half to death in a flappy plane :)
Exactly, this design at the scale in this movie will never happen. Too complex, materials that can't take the insane fatigue cycles, the need for extreme vibration cancelling measures. It's ridiculous especially when other flying craft designs could accomplish the same or better flight with less complexity and greater reliability.
The baguette thopter was not what I expected
A fellow war thunder player I see
@@theumbreon1.0 yes, a bit more than that since my soul is chained
5:23 those wings were trying to warn the french about the Germans 😂
I thought the exact same thing 💀
The way he says ornithopter differently each time 😂
He's a robot and only says what the idiot driving the channel with a dodgy spell check tells him to say.
@@crackedemerald4930
No he just can't read.
His best work is turning _UTIAS ornithopter number 1_ into _UTIAS orthanopter no one._
You should hear him say messerschmitt😂
@@MarkusSnyman-t5o messerschmitt is easy asf to say even for non german speaker tbh, i'd like to ear him say bayerische flugzeugwerke 😂
Maybe it's a reference to National Lampoon's Doon, where they call it an "orthodontothopter". Too bad not enough people know about this awesome little parody book.
the shape of the broken wings at 5:32 is.... ironic
Foreshadowing
WOW 😂😅 this machine was a crystal ball for the feature prediction
Looks like a old Germany Symbol 😂
5:17 An experimental French ornithopter turning itself into a 'windmill' before the German invasion was definitely an omen.
It's made the swastika and surrendered😅
Flapping or oscillating Wings on aircraft are like legs on land vehicles. We know how they ought to work, but we do not know how to make them survive working or power them to operate them for a useful amount of time.
Turned German for a moment there
Thats what I thought
Thats why Paris fell
@@엄희성-t3u
🤣
@@thelettera582 i think he was talking about when the wings bent and kinda looked like a swastika 5:31
@@Pixilated My bad, I did not see that
You’d be surprised by how many crazy French designs made it into today’s day to day life, to the point we don’t even think about it.
From the jet engine, designed early last century when airplanes where made out of wood and fabric and that today powers airliners and fighter jets, to the statoreactor (ramjet), the pulsoreactor that powered the V1s, the quadrocopter that today everybody flies under the form of drones, the automobile, etc…
Ornithopters are such a cool concept
I think they'll make a come back. They clearly work but now we have the solid state autopilot and stability control systems to make it work as well as high power electric motors for control of wing flapping, articulation and warping. They will be VTOL and very quiet.
@@williamzk9083 not sure about that, they would be less efficient, a lot more stress on the moving parts and who knows how loud it would be because there isn't a full scale working version
@@williamzk9083
Energy efficiency and the ridiculously high inertial forces at the wings with every direction change at this speed negate your idea
Thats why you dont see this on larger animals.
@@alphadawg81 pterodactyls with wing spans of 10n/33ft and 250kg flew and leaped into the air. Only minimal Stresses would be involved. The inertia of the gentle downwards propulsive beat is arrested by aerodynamic lift itself. The wing then twist and rises gently under its own lift till at the top of the stroke when it descended da again. There would be no huge forces at the shoulder Joint
@@williamzk9083The bigger an animal, the less it flaps. For good reasons. Large Pterosaurs would have hardly flapped in flight mode.
Orthinopter sounds like an aircraft powered by bone 🦴
Fun fact according to the Dune lore, ornithopters are powered by a giant living mollusk bred to flap the wings
like a cartoon
lmfao he said orthinopter lmfao
Bone would be Ossis or Osteo as präfix. Ortho means straight or correct. Pteron is the wing , dont ask about the ino^^
Now imagine again what that would be.
A normal plain ;)
planes: fly
helicopters: beat gravity into submission
Ornithopter: full BDSM fetish with the air
VIBRATION
THRASH THRASH
hornythopter
hornytopter
hornitopter
I always find the way you said "Orthinopter" rather than "Ornithopter" is hilarious :D
I have a friend in his 70s is educated and pronounces aluminum as alunimum, cracks me up every time he does it but all his brothers say it the same!
the biggest benefit of elastic wing tip is that airbus don't have to pay extra for extra wide terminal. The price gone through the roof even if you wing span a few feet too wide. A lot design consideration end up need to accommodating airport pricing instead of pure aerodynamic performance.
Pairs of counterbalanced "fixed-blade" wings, which oscillate upon a desmodromically driven crankshaft, will be more efficient both mechanically and in terms of weight, and will be substantially more manageable/reliable/durable, than a hinged or split wing ornithopter. Utilizing greater quantities of smaller wings and an additional axis of oscillation should further improve effective output, as the winglets form a larger "dynamically ducted" wing, and reduce losses to aerodynamic drag by "slicing" upwards into the air, and "beating" downwards against the air.
Thanks, but I think you need to provide us with a diagram of what you just said. 😅
I wish I spoke engineer but sounds awesome
or you're totally wrong and wings actually work worse in air agitated by other wings ahead of them... which is what real life aircraft and racing cars' spoilers show to be the case. 😒
ornithopter wings certainly do need to change pitch or be flexible to change pitch by yielding to air resistance, more on the upstroke, which seems to be one of the things you're suggesting, without that, an ornithopter is entirely hopeless. insects generally fly that way, as do hummingbirds (the latter are the flying animals most easily replicated in simple hovering flight by ornithopters). some birds and I think more so bats fly mostly in a sort of butterfly stroke swimming like motion that involves complex folding of the wings to pull them forward, which would be very difficult to replicate. and many like small songbirds actually use a really strange looking standard flying pattern in which they flap a few strokes to propel up and forward, then tuck their wings in and arc a bit up and then down again like a little torpedo, so they bounce up and down. ai reckon it's probably an adaptation that they're evolved to basically do for fun, while it serves the evolutionary purpose of being more difficult for a surprise attack from an aerial predator like a falcon to hit them.
Desmodromes. I haven't heard that word since college....and a Ducati brochure talking about their desmosedice engine 😅
we need Thunderf00t in on this
Between this ornithopter and the exaggerated tumblehome design of their pre-dreadnought warships, I have concluded that France is a Jules Verne fever dream.
5:32 the ornithopters folded itself into a swastika
The shockwaves of the wing tips continually breaking the sound barrier would cause such vibration that any known material would never withstand this.
it'd be basically the Thunderscreech all over again, except instead of a single (quite short, stout and rigid) propeller moved by a double engine connected to a single shaft, it'd be four independent wings with either two or four engines on a crank to move the wing up and down. Forget the vibrations on the wing itself, not sure any sort of engine would be able to withstand the stress of having to move a whole ass wing at basically supersonic speeds without wanting to jump out of the fuselage
There have been a couple of prop driven designs whose propeller tips broke the sound barrier. The engines didn't explode, but the pilots suffered constant severe headaches from being bombarded by dozens of tiny sonic booms all the time.
@@lukedogwalker a single design, the Thunderscreech, and it literally rattled the plane loose after a single hour of flight... assuming the test pilot could withstand the nausea that long
@@DonPatrono I thought there was also a variant/prototype of the Wyvern that this was tried with, but was abandoned.
@@DonPatrono the Tu-95's blade tips exceed the speed of sound. There's a reason it's infamously loud.
French challenge: dont go crazy (extreme difficulty):
in the dune lore, the ornithopter's power actually comes from a clam opening and shutting rapidly inside the aircraft
I don't know enough about Dune lore to say if that's true, but I know enough to say it's entirely plausible.
Lolwut?! I don't remember that
This sounds totally plausible from someone who tried reading dune at too young and age and gave up
Oh yeah, vibration would **obliterate** those wings in moments.
No matter what it's made of. Unless it's self-repairing, it's gonna experience a ton of stress fatigue very quickly
It all started with James Pitts' "Sky Car" vibrating orthotopter umbrella, then the umbrella was closed with a dome and devices appeared according to the scheme of conventional electromagnetic vibrating speakers (membrane + inductance) - fragments of the membrane were found by a farmer in Roswell. Then they created piezoelectric thrusters, or with small dischargers on the surface (they glowed all over the body due to ionization of the air), and now they are planes with plasma propulsion panels (so they are angular - that is, with flat surfaces). Thousands of discharge cells are densely packed into motor panels - they shoot streams of plasma (railgun architecture - coaxial electrodes). The ionized air of the spark discharge is accelerated in the railgun chamber by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. 💥💥💥💥💥
Please make a video about flying AutoGyros. They are an overlooked underused technology.
1:35 and no --- there's no way a huge aircraft can fly like a small dragonfly --- air itself behaves different for larger objects and the most doubtful is the wing flapping frequency --- no way the wings would need to flap that frequent as even big birds don't do that
9:30
Imagine being kinda scared of flying, braving it, looking out the window at altitude and seeing the wingtips flap around wildly
The speed required by the flapping wings at this scale exceeds the speed of sound, which is impossible without breaking those wings. Microscopic drones are, on the other hand, perfectly feasable, imitating dragonflies.
Instead of Arsenal Bird French is gonna build Arsenal Dragonfly
_Arsenal Libellule, s'il vous plaît!_
The bird of pray would be cool. But could you imagine the panic of a nervous flyer, with the outer wings of the albatross, and probably why it was named after that bird too. Has the four times 20 living people panic thinking the wings are falling off lol. I would not like to be on it.
Is it just me or does he keep saying "Orthinopter"? Check near 3:40
It wouldn't be Found and Explained without him mispronouncing something important.
If the aircraft is small is could , maybe ,it could work.
Imagine the tinnitus from that sound
kinda funny how the destroyed prototypes wings formed a Swastika like shape, almost foreshadowing for them lol.
10:28 but you said at 2:00 the flapping wing design would have advantages in energy savings over a fixed wing plane, so which is it?
It has literally no advantages. The guy who made the video doesn't know what he's talking about
@@Oscarius yeah, i noticed he cant read some of the words in the script he has been given either
Thank you Nick for featuring this video! 🙂👍 I remember asking you while you were in the recent Dubai Air Show if you're going to make a video discussing about the aircraft featured in Dune Films. Dream come true! 👏🙌
can you do a video of the Coanda 1910 jet biplane? the first "jet plane" before ww1. It was made by the same guy who discovered the Coanda effect.
I was just reading about the UTIAS Ornithopter recently. The bouncing up and down you mentioned near the end of the video is definitely an issue, especially at takeoff. Wings go down, fuselage lifts up, wings go up, fuselage slams down into the pavement. The landing gear is strong enough to take that, but it still lost a bit of speed every time that happened, which is why they needed to add a (very small) jet engine to finally make it fly.
Should be less of an issue with the French one though. Two sets of wings moving in opposite directions would counterbalance each other.
"Or-NI-thopter", not "Or-THIN-opter" ... the pronounciation of that and other words in the video is driving me insane lol
3:00 Orthinopter...
😀
I'm sure he'll fix it in post. 😛
Ornithoptors will never be used as war-machine because the wing flapping will create too much noise and it will be less efficient. 👍
But birds tho
@@FoundAndExplained the way bird flies, it would create too much pressure on the pilot. But if controlled remotely then,it could be useful but the production cost would be a pain.
birds are a lot lighter, so materials just arent up to it at our scale. yet. besides, we have jet engines.@FoundAndExplained
A prototype called Riout 102T was built back around ww2 was built by the french
How do you pronounce ornithopter wrong after Dune 1 and 2?
And he said that the titular planet in the story is called Dune. It is not.
@@ryanlunde575Factual errors and wonky pronunciation are kind of his thing.
@@PaulMcElligott Wonky pronunciation, fine, but factual errors? How is that someone's "thing"? That just means they are wrong about things, and their work is not useful to learn things from.
@@BramKaandorp No disagreement from me. This guy butchers names and facts all the time. People call him out, and he laughs it off. Kind of why I don’t watch his videos nearly as much as I used to.
@@PaulMcElligott Can't argue with that. Plus, there are plenty of channels that do get the facts right.
Can you do Rockwell X-30 and Tupolev Tu-2000 Hypersonic flight experimental aircrafts?
Watching a warthunder ad as im climbing at 20° in my XP55 in air RB
Still one of the most OP props 😂😂
@@georgearrivals nah the XP-55 is fine, it's the weird pusher prop, it's good but not OP. You're thinking of the XP-50, that's the OP one 😂
@@Onezmhu No I’m talking about the ass ender, even with the nerf it still pulls energy out of its ass
@@georgearrivals ah, i mean yeah it's kind of a UFO, but slightly less annoying that the xp 50
@@georgearrivals it's nuts eating spitfire and bf109s for breakfast
I counted three different pronunciations each for "ornithopter" and "oscillation."
Ze Spice must flow, hon hon hon.
😂
Gold 🤣
I mean dune actor is French 😅
Le spice besoin flow
Ah, you mean l'épice, ou le mélange.
It all becomes so much classier by adding vowels and accents 😂
So you could have called it the French Fly...
I'll see myself out...
Orthinopter?
Man i love ur videos and you have rekindled my interest in aviation and other weird things!!! These videos keep me occupied and enthralled for hours on end well done you deserve a subscriber and keep up the good work!!!!
You say "orthinopter" a *lot*.
"energy SAVINGS???"
Uh, no, No and HELL NO!
Do you have any idea how much energy is lost from flapping wings every time they're switching movement direction?
Ridiculously much.
And the same switch also causes massive force un the wing. Chances are BAD that wings will snap. Just as the French prototype did.
And the problems becomes exponentially worse with every increase in size.
To have any chance of working beyond micro scale, you also need to figure out how to not lose a huge amount of lift from every upthrust of the wings.
Personally, if i wanted something fictional-ish with these kind of abilities? I'd much rather go with Airwolf.
At least there, i can sort of figure out how to make it(supersonic helicopter) work in theory even if it's probably impossible in practice.
ORTHINOPTER
I would thing rather than flex the wings would twist, on the down stroke they would be flat but on the up stroke the trailing edge would passively twist down, that would have the result of making them act like a propeller on the upstroke but lift on the down stroke. Mechanically this would be simple to implement and would put far less stress on the materials, though it would make it very loud as because the the bearing for the twisting motion would have to have have probably spring loaded stops to limit the movement.
Very interesting, if hardly practical. But it's orNITHopter, not orTHINopter.
So many people clicked on this video just to blast the french😂
I could see a drone doing this.
Ornithopter, not Orthonopter...
Ornitho- (bird) -pter (wing), which happens to not be a proper description of these as they mimic insect wings, not bird wings, Entomopter would be a more fitting name
For an ornithopter to work, I believe that the solution is not to make the wings go up and down, but to make the wings make movement similar to scooping the air and push it down. Like mosquitos do!
Do whatever you want with that information.
5:26 the shape. . .
As others have said: "Sounds good! Doesn't work."
Take a look at the rubber powered toy ornithopers available all around the world. They stay aloft for a fraction of the time that a rubber powered fixed wing toy plane does.
Large flexing structures like flapping wings would put large stresses on the aircraft.
The flapping mechanism would be far more complex and delicate than a helicopter's rotor's hub.
In short it would be an underpowered, overstressed, maintenance nightmare used to duplicate things that we already have working fine.
But, it Would look cool in CGI videos...
It all started with James Pitts' "Sky Car" vibrating orthotopter umbrella, then the umbrella was closed with a dome and devices appeared according to the scheme of conventional electromagnetic vibrating speakers (membrane + inductance) - fragments of the membrane were found by a farmer in Roswell. Then they created piezoelectric thrusters, or with small dischargers on the surface (they glowed all over the body due to ionization of the air), and now they are planes with plasma propulsion panels (so they are angular - that is, with flat surfaces). Thousands of discharge cells are densely packed into motor panels - they shoot streams of plasma (railgun architecture - coaxial electrodes). The ionized air of the spark discharge is accelerated in the railgun chamber by the Lorentz force to enormous speeds - a kind of ramjet engine is obtained. Just imagine! - tens of thousands of small ramjet engines assembled in panels and launching plasma synchronously at a huge frequency (hundreds of kilohertz). Plasma jets form toroidal air vortices - this air cushion creates lift and acceleration.💥
🕳💥💥💥💥💥💥
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im from Germany and i can really tell how you struggled with "Messerschmitt" you said it like Mesch scher schmitt :D Love your videos
The riout 102t was a French design that heavily reassembled the ornitopther though it was scrapped due to structural issues
The French has a rich history of aero engineering. Not many people outside of history buffs and engineers know this.
The wings would need to twist and flap since a dragonfly or bee fly by creating a low pressure area above the wing it couldn't flyy like a normal airplane. It generates lift in a completely different way.
Someone did the math and the wings of the ornithopters from the Dune movie would be breaking the sound barrier. So each wing would be creating 2 sonic booms in one full cycle and there are at least for wings so that would be one LOUD craft. With all the other problems like material strength and the articulation required it seems so much easier to just use helicopter blades.
2:16 CH53 "Yas'ur" יסעור in the wild.
We fly them is very dusty environmets, notice the specially ordered particle filters on the engine intakes.
Isn't this the "flying plane" that NerdCubed showed off in one of his flight simulator videos a while ago?
In the 60's, we had balsa wood gliders with nose-weights to throw and balsa wood gliders with rubber bands to twist a propellor and store energy, then throw.
As an Army Brat, my family was in W. Germany a lot. Toy stores over there had this rubber band-powered cellophane bird that would flap around in the air for a few circles.
Pretty cool take on the rubber band-powered flying machine, imho, back then.
I guess the toy was basically an ornithopter...
It seems pretty clear to me, and I'm not even an engineer, that the stresses on the wings changing direction so quickly would very quickly break something. Fixed wing aircraft only have the drag on the wing going in the same direction, and rotary wings always rotate in the same direction, so they are not constantly moving in one direction, then the opposite direction, several times per second. For fun, take a tape measure out and move slowly. If you only move it slowly, it will remain rigid, but if you move it faster, it will bend.
We finally have it the french version of Dune, Fune. Featuring a giant baguette worm
The most important thing to note is that design only really works well because of the flexible wing. That plane would never fly.
Idk how will those wings for thos props materials would be but i have a feeling this is where graphene shines so well..
The dragonfly is the closest analogy. The main problem is one of mass. The bigger the size the higher the involved masses become, in this case particularly because the length of a wing will speed up the tips very strongly even at low flapping frequencies. It’s a bit like the question why we do not have exoskeletons like insects. We would become incredibly heavy and breathing ducts in stead of lungs would be too inefficient. There simply is a scale limit for such solutions.
Stationary and Rotating airfoils make sense because they maintain a constant direction and a steady resistance. Flapping wings abruptly stop and change direction several times a second. I don’t think there are materials strong enough to withstand that force and the vibration has to be insane. Dragonflies and bees buzz when they fly, imagine the buzz when it weighs a ton or more.
didnt work out very well the save paris part
In the nature the biggest flaing creature by rapidly flapping it's wings is Kolibry, other smaller ones are insects. So you there is no way to scale this principals on a scale. The Kolibry is the biggest it can get airborne.
"Airbus is making ornithopters" - shows designs that are not ornithopters.
I didn't knew engineers of my own country tried this seriously without the composite material we have today.
"We don't have oil, but we have ideas" in practice before this sentence even became a thing.
Ornithopters are really cool, I am a huge nerd in early aviation and not once have I ever heard of this craft!
I die a little every time he says orthinopter
With deformable wings, this design can not only overcome turbulence, but *exploit* it like an insect.
1:01 who know the name to this Ancient Greek style tune?
The vibrations would have it destroyed in seconds. This hilarious Concept wasn't new and in no way functional. Even today with all the computer supported technic it would have more flaws then the infamouse "Triebflügel-Jäger" from Focke-Wulf. Funny to see but c'mmon it's hilarious 😂😂
I think if you put enough helicopter engineers in one session with enough cash they could develop something pretty close to the dune ornithopter
Guess you missed a point: In Dune exist a technology called „repulsor“ for flight - seen in the air-floating lights or Baron Harkonnens ability to lift himself in the air. Those seem to be used in Ornithopters too
Im not surprised this wasnt able to be made
The most realistic part about dune is spice letting you see the future and that really says something
I think we should be thinking more along the lines of check valves for the up stroke and down stroke. Allow air to pass thru the wing on the up stroke but seal in the down. I thing it would be easy to protoype.
Casually observing that bugs' wings flap therefor fly, will never lead to manned flight; one would be better suited to observing a rower to determine flight-mechanics of flapping-wings: pivots on a rigid-wing would only toss the center of gravity repeatedly body-slamming the fuselage on deck. Wings would snap unless they bowed on every stroke, flapping angles would have to be pitched rolled swung and reversed twice per stroke.
Oh my God, I can't believe you made this video that I suggested to you in the comments
At around 12:30...
Yes, you struggled, but you managed to pronounce Messerschmitt somewhat right, and you put effort into it.
Thanks just for that, attention to detail is noticed, and is why I like your vids so much!
This is not an Ornithopter! From Greek Ornis means 'bird'. An Ornithopter is a device that imitates the flight of a bird.
This device imitates the flight of an insect. Therefore it should be called Entomopter!
Wow that’s actually very true!
I'm in toronto right now, and It's pretty rare for a project like THIS to happen near me.
Hearing “Brought to you by War
Thunder” instead of Squarespace was like a slap in the face
i feel like having a static wing flip up and down will not be efficient. either have the wing do some kind of fold on the way up to reduce resistance. or have it work like a bee wing that kinda "drills" upwords
I had 2 or 3 RC dragonflies in my childhood days actually, and they could stay in the air as long as i wanted, or even shoot straight up into the sky if i went on full throttle. It was awesome to see them fly using their 4 flapping wings gaining vertical and horizontal thrust at the same time. And oh boy let me tell you those things were maneuverable. :D