Visual guide to airfoils

Bartosz Ciechanowski is at it again with an in-depth explainer that makes heavy use of slider-driven interactive graphics. This time he simulated the patterns of air flowing over and around the wings of an airplane, also known as airfoil.

The length of each article starts to feel kind of long at times, but there’s something to these simple sliders that are useful in keeping you engaged and helping to understand the physics.

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Bird flight patterns captured through long-exposure photography

For several years, Xavi Bou has been using long-exposure photography to capture stills of bird flight patterns. The project, Ornitographies, produced gloriously abstract images. There’s also a video (above) piece under the same premise.

Jessica McKenzie, reporting for Audubon:

More recently, Bou has expanded the project to video, including one called Murmurations that shows a flock of starlings evading a hawk. “What happens is, if in this moment a hawk appears to attack them, it’s when they do this dance,” he says. “The hawk is like carving this ephemeral sculpture that’s in the air.” As with the still images, Bou knit multiple series of photographs together to create an animation. He estimates that every day of filming requires two weeks of post-production work; for Murmurations, he also enlisted the help of a film editor. The final product, which was filmed in southern Catalonia, was then set to ethereal music.

The video deserves the full-screen treatment.

See also the swallows of essex by Dennis Hlynsky.

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Maps of grounded flights after Covid-19

As you would expect, not many people are flying these days. The Washington Post mapped the halts around the world:

On Tuesday, the TSA screened just over 146,000 passengers at U.S. airports, a 94 percent plunge from 2.4 million on the same day last year. By the end of March, the TSA screened just over 35 million passengers at U.S. airports during the month, a 50 percent decrease from more than 70 million at the end of March last year.

At this point, I would gladly wait a couple of hours in a security line for just a taste of normalcy.

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Boeing draws a plane in the sky with flight path

In a test flight, Boeing took the thing where you draw using your GPS path to a whole different level. They drew the outline of a plane that spanned the latitude of the conterminous United States.

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Pteranodon osteohistology! Or, bizarrely bacon-esque pteranodon bones..

1-300x137This is a guest post by Taormina Lepore following the SVP annual meeting in Dallas. In the Mesozoic Era, the time of dinosaurs, the skies were filled with monsters. Leathery wings, long beaks, bizarre forelimbs modified

Flight of the Bats: Exploring Head Shape and Aerodynamics

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s a bat! All three may be soaring through the sky, but their shapes vary greatly, which affects their aerodynamics during flight. Birds typically have streamlined head profiles that strongly contrast with the appendages featured on … Continue reading »

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