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What do a bumble bee and a 747 jet have in common? It’s not a trick question. The fact is they have quite a lot in common. They both have wings. They both fly. And they’re both ideally suited to it. They just do it differently. Why Don’t Jumbo Jets Flap Their Wings? offers a fascinating explanation of how nature and human engineers each arrived at powered flight. What emerges is a highly readable account of two very different approaches to solving the same fundamental problems of moving through the air, including lift, thrust, turning, and landing. The book traces the slow and deliberate evolutionary process of animal flight—in birds, bats, and insects—over millions of years and compares it to the directed efforts of human beings to create the aircraft over the course of a single century. Among the many questions the book answers: Why are wings necessary for flight? How do different wings fly differently? When did flight evolve in animals? What vision, knowledge, and technology was needed before humans could learn to fly? Why are animals and aircrafts perfectly suited to the kind of flying they do? David E. Alexander first describes the basic properties of wings before launching into the diverse challenges of flight and the concepts of flight aerodynamics and control to present an integrated view that shows both why birds have historically had little influence on aeronautical engineering and exciting new areas of technology where engineers are successfully borrowing ideas from animals.

Birds --- Airplanes --- Flying-machines --- Animal flight --- Aeronautics --- Aves --- Avian fauna --- Avifauna --- Wild birds --- Amniotes --- Vertebrates --- Ornithology --- Aeroplanes --- Aircraft, Fixed wing --- Fixed wing aircraft --- Planes (Airplanes) --- Aircraft industry --- Flight --- Machinery --- Animal flying --- Animals --- Flight in animals --- Animal locomotion --- Wings (Anatomy)

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This book will take you on an exciting journey made up of texts and images. Spectacular, large-scale photographs printed on double pages and accompanied by explanatory texts will arouse the reader’s curiosity about evolution’s accomplishments in the world of flying: from the botanical air fleet (pollen grains, flying seeds…), over flying snakes and fish, to penguins flying underwater and humans rising into the air. Mathematician and passionate animal photographer Georg Glaser has joined forces with the experienced evolutionary biologist Hannes Paulus and the exercise physiologist and flight biophysicist Werner Nachtigall in order to approach this topic with words and pictures in a way that is both generally comprehensible and scientifically sound. Double-page by double-page, the book can be read in any order. Cross-references allow to jump easily from one double-page to another. Aside from the detailed introduction to each chapter, the text passages are usually independent from one another, and they discuss crucial moments in the evolutionary process. The double-pages provide additional information on bibliographical references and references to informative websites.

Life sciences. --- Animal ecology. --- Evolutionary biology. --- Zoology. --- Nature. --- Environment. --- Life Sciences. --- Evolutionary Biology. --- Popular Life Sciences. --- Popular Science in Nature and Environment. --- Animal Ecology. --- Animal flight. --- Wings (Anatomy) --- Wing (Anatomy) --- Wings --- Animal flying --- Animals --- Flight in animals --- Flight --- Forelimb --- Animal flight --- Animal locomotion --- Evolution (Biology). --- Zoology --- Ecology --- Biology --- Natural history --- Biosciences --- Sciences, Life --- Science --- Animal evolution --- Biological evolution --- Darwinism --- Evolutionary biology --- Evolutionary science --- Origin of species --- Evolution --- Biological fitness --- Homoplasy --- Natural selection --- Phylogeny --- Balance of nature --- Bionomics --- Ecological processes --- Ecological science --- Ecological sciences --- Environment --- Environmental biology --- Oecology --- Environmental sciences --- Population biology