Author:
mark farmer
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Date Posted: 17:24:21 05/14/16 Sat
Google has become my speller of choice. I am amazed that it can take my misguided letters arrangements & identify the word that my memory has buried under dusty files of names, dates, & relations.
I am in awe of its power.
Mark Farmer
>One of the problems of the Internet is the sheer
>amount of data out there, and the fascination you can
>have by learning about a subject that you previously
>only had a mild interest in, but find fascinating for
>some reason. I've never heard of this syndrome being
>defined or named, but it happens to me all the time.
>
>Last week I wrote a rather fanciful column about a
>dream I had, where I observed what looked to be a
>cow-sized pterodactyl. Now, I wasn't absolutely sure
>how to spell the word, so I turned to the Internet.
>One thing led to another and I blew away the afternoon
>in the process.
>
>I soon learned that pterodactyls were actually only
>about the size of a goose, or perhaps better, a blue
>heron. But somewhere in the past I remembered that
>there were bigger ones. The flying reptiles of the
>distant past were correctly called pterosaurs, and the
>biggest one known, Quetzalcoatlus northropi,
>had a wingspan that was perhaps as much forty feet.
>That's a size of a small airplane. (I find it
>interesting that the species name, northropi,
>honors Jack Northrop, the man who essentially made the
>flying wing a practicality.) Albatrosses have
>wingspans that reach eleven feet, for example, a
>pretty big wingspan for a bird that weighs less than
>twenty pounds.
>
>Reading the article about the Quetzalcoatlus
>northropi was interesting. There have been
>scientists in the past who have speculated that a bird
>that large couldn't fly. However, it's pretty clear
>that this pterosaur could fly, and as I read down this
>article I came across a name I knew from my own past:
>Paul Macready, who was the guy that proved that the
>old dinosaur could fly well.
>
>I met Paul Macready briefly once long ago; his
>specific interest was in low-power, low-speed
>high-efficiency flight. In the late 1940s he was three
>times the national soaring champion, and once world
>champion. But he's better known for his work on
>human-powered flight; you might remember the
>Gossamer Condor, which was the first
>human-powered plane to fly a figure eight, and the
>Gossamer Albatross, the first human powered
>plane to fly across the English Channel. He was
>involved with the first solar-powered airplane, too.
>
>The Smithsonian Institution got Macready interested in
>the problem of pterosaur flight, and in 1984 threw a
>half-million dollars at him to build a half-scale
>model that could be used for an IMAX movie. Without
>getting to the details -- and they are fascinating --
>Macready and his model pterosaur proved that control
>was a lot more complicated than anyone had realized,
>and that wings had to do several things at the same
>time. Macready and his cohorts wound up building a
>battery-powered radio-controlled model, in which a
>small computer handled the wing and other stability
>problems. This is nothing new; most new
>high-performance airplanes today are "fly by wire" in
>which a computer handles the difficult stuff while a
>pilot just tells it where to go. This model had a
>wingspan of eighteen feet, which he reasoned was all
>right to work on a model of an immature pterosaur.
>
>Anyway, the QN, as it was called, worked. It had to be
>towed to get it off the ground but once there it could
>gain altitude on its own. In the few videos of the QN
>I found on the net, it didn't have the range of motion
>a bird has. I think it would be cool to see it fly,
>but it was destroyed in a crash when the radio control
>link failed. From what I can tell from web searching,
>there have been attempts to build larger versions with
>varying success, but they didn't have Paul Macready
>and a half-million 1984 dollars involved.
>
>But my curiosity went on from there. I had always
>believed that orthinopters were pretty much a pipe
>dream, but no. A few years ago someone built a
>human-powered ornithopter, and several powered
>versions have been built. I saw another video of a
>small uncontrolled, pterosaur-shaped ornithopter
>flying around inside a guys workshop.
>
>There are model ornithopters around, and some are
>quite successful. With all the media hassle about
>drones, I think it would be neat to have a bird (or
>possibly even a pterosaur) drone. Alas, I will never
>have that kind of money or interest.
>
>It was a fascinating search, and it all came about
>because I wanted to spell pterodactyl correctly.
>
>-- Wes
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