The Friday Fillip: Fly Like a Bird

A couple of years back, I took you to a place in Germany where they were making penguins fly. Today I’d like to take you back there again, because this time they’ve managed to make a herring gull fly. Big whoop, you say. Yes, except that the herring gull is a construct of foam and carbon fibre — and it flies by flapping its wings, something no other human construct has been able to do reliably.

The place is the Festo firm, and the gull is SmartBird:

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings not only beat up and down, but also twist at specific angles. This is made possible by an active articulated torsional drive unit, which in combination with a complex control system attains an unprecedented level of efficiency in flight operation. Festo has thus succeeded for the first time in creating an energy-efficient technical adaptation of this model from nature.

On this page, you’ll find a number of films, showing off SmartBird. Start, perhaps, with the tab labelled “Film,” just to see what this creature can do. And then have a look at the “Making of” tab, which goes into much more detail. Once you’re past the earnestness of the German engineers in their jackets and ties, you’ll begin to appreciate, I think, the impressive nature of what Festo’s accomplished and also, I hope, the beauty of flight itself.

If, perchance, you’re interested in reading about SmartBird, rather than watching it, Festo’s also produced an e-book, Festo Smartbird, that lets you flip through the story.

And now for something completely different, because the soundtrack behind the Festo film kind of sucked. Here are a couple of tunes via YouTube (there’s no “movie” with them, so I’ve reduced the embed to give you just the controls). First, the incomparable Boz Scaggs with “Fly Like a Bird.” A trifle hokey, but the Cajun feel hooks you in.

Then an odd one, a Nelly Furtado / Asha Bhosle remix of “I’m Like a Bird.” Nelly you know. Asha you may not. Among other things, she’s the most celebrated Hindi playback singer and has voiced more than a thousand Bollywood films.