The physical environment of the aerosphere is both complex and dynamic, and poses many challenges to the locomotor systems of the three extant evolutionary lineages of flying animals. Many features of the aerosphere, operating over spatial and temporal scales of many orders of magnitude, have the potential to be important influences on animal flight, and much as marine ecologists have studied t...

Here, a descriptive study is reported that addresses the relationship between flight control performance and instrument scanning behavior. This work was performed in a fixed-based flight simulator. It targets the ability of untrained novices to pilot a lightweight rotorcraft in a flight scenario that consisted of fundamental mission task elements such as speed and altitude changes. The results ...

Eugene L. Duke * Marle D. Hewett t Randal W. Brumbaugh David M. Tartt t Robert F. Antoniewicz * Arvind K. Agarwal 5 An automated flight test management system (ATMS) and its use to develop a rapid-prototyping flight research facility for artificial intelligence-based flight systems concepts are described. The ATMS provides a flight test engineer with a set of tools that assist in flight plannin...

One of the issues that impair the performance of aircraft engine fault diagnosis is the flight regime. When an aircraft travels from one point to another in flight regime, engine performance parameters that are used for fault diagnosing change and such changes mask the parameter changes caused by engine faults, thus make the engine fault diagnosis much more difficult. Properly addressing the fl...

Movement uses resources that may otherwise be allocated to somatic maintenance or reproduction. How does increased energy expenditure affect resource allocation? Using the butterfly Speyeria mormonia, we tested whether experimentally increased flight affects fecundity, lifespan or flight capacity. We measured body mass (storage), resting metabolic rate and lifespan (repair and maintenance), fli...

The strange three-dimensional flight behaviour of slowly spinning soccer balls is one of the most interesting and unknown phenomenon associated with the trajectories of sports balls. Many spectators have experienced numerous exciting and emotional instances while observing the curious flight behaviour of these balls. We examine the aerodynamic mechanisms of erratic ball behaviours through real ...

We have studied the nocturnal flight behaviour of the common swift (Apus apus L.), by the use of a tracking radar. Birds were tracked from Lund University in southern Sweden during spring migration, summer roosting flights and autumn migration. Flight speeds were compared with predictions from flight mechanical and optimal migration theories. During spring, flight speeds were predicted to be hi...

I present MelodyMorph, a reconfigurable musical instrument designed with a focus on melodic improvisation. It is designed for a touch-screen interface, and allows the user to create “bells” which can be tapped to play a note, and dragged around on a pannable and zoomable canvas. Colors, textures and shapes of the bells represent pitch and timbre properties. “Recorder bells” can store and play b...

In this work we provide sufficient conditions under which a general counting process stopped at a random time independent from the process belongs to the reliability decreasing reversed hazard rate (DRHR) or increasing failure rate (IFR) class. We also give some applications of these results in generalized renewal and trend renewal processes stopped at a random time.