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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

The German industrial control and automation company Festo [0] created a bionic swift [1] as an engineering demo this year. The flapping wings are no longer as rigid as in their earlier flapping bird model [2]. Go and check out their other stuff (e.g. a dragonfly: [3], a flying fox or aquatic animals), it's great! Here is a Youtube search for Festo Animals for your convenience [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festo

[1] BionicSwift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUE8o056Cpc

[2] SmartBird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnR8fDW3Ilo

[3] Dragonfly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj1yhz5io20

[4] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Festo+Animals

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Reminds me of Tyrell Corporation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSOzdFoZsho

How does that make you feel?

Let me tell you how it makes me feel.

A friend of mine lives a few cities from a Festo factory.

She didn't know what they build, but she always said the name Festo sounds like being an evil corp in a scifi story.

She was a bit shook, when I told her about the robots, haha

My friend, the late Michael Polatnick, coined a word to describe your friend. “Stupido.”

Festo got big making pneumatic devices and grippers, parts that are used in almost every automated factory. And almost every mechanical engineer involved with mechanisms knows of Festo.

Hate to break it to you but "stupido" is conventional Italian for stupid/idiot.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=it&tl=en&text=stupido&op=tr...

Do you like our owl?

This is very impressive. However - is there not a problem of scale? As you scale, surface area is squared, but mass is cubed. I mean, ok, you could have a lighter central fuselage, but then how effective can this be in carrying passengers or cargo?

Planes aren't filled solidly, though. They are more like a shell around a volume, so I'd think the mass would rather scale like the surface area than the volume of the plane. Beside that, I would agree that it seems impossible to get such a solution working in dimensions of dozens of meters. A pun: maybe they just took "do things that don't scale" too literally? ;)

Bigger wings?

Bigger wings means heavier wings, and greater torque needed to actuate the wings, which means more power needed as well as greater stresses involved, all of which means even more mass, which eats into your payload budget.

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