Whether one is able to settle on a working solution involves luck. The article says they "noticed" that birds warp their wings. They were unlucky, for a time, in that they experienced adverse yaw. Then they were unlucky, for a time, when a fixed tail arrangement did not work. Then they made the tail assembly steerable.
They were also unlucky in that they killed a passenger, but lucky that it wasn't rather than one, or both, of themselves. I realized that luck-minimizing framings are popular within entrepreneurial settings, and particularly in cultures where we're all "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but it would be far healthier if we took on board the role that fortune plays in success. We would be, for example, far more heroic if we were facing odds, rather than a grind with a guaranteed success at the end.