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Why Don't Jumbo
Jets Flap Their Wings?
Price: $26.95
Subtitle:
Flying Animals,
Flying Machines, and How They Are Different
Author:
David E. Alexander
Subject: Science
and Technology
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4479-3
Pages: 272 pages
Publication Date: July 2009
Praise for Why Don't Jumbo Jets Flap
Their Wings?
"This book lucidly
captures the comparative aerodynamics of winged animals and aircrafts
with great skill and clarity. This is science writing at its best and
is a valuable reference for the specialist as well as for the casual
enthusiast of flight." —Sankar
Chatterjee, Paul Whitfield Horn
Professor of Geosciences, Texas Tech University
"David Alexander has produced an astonishingly readable and enjoyable
romp through topics in flight mechanics. This book cuts through
the obtuse and obscure without sacrificing scholarship."—Catherine
Loudon, University of California, Irvine
"David E. Alexander has
managed to
combine a fascinating collection of different subjects under the
discussion of
the similarities and differences between flying animals and flying
machines.
The book is part history, part biology, part science, and part
technology. The
writing style is engaging, sliding back and forth between nature and
machine,
comparing, contrasting, and developing the history."—NSTA Recommends, 10/21/09
"There are literally
thousands of books available on the tlight of aircraft or of animals.
All of them touch on one or the other form of flight, but this volume
concentrates specifically on the comparison of the two. Alexander covers basic
aerodynamics, flight control and sensors, soaring and hovering flight,
and aerial combat. Recommended."—Choice, Dec 2009
Description:
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.
About the Author:
DAVID E. ALEXANDER is an assistant professor of entomology
in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of
Kansas. He is the author of Nature’s
Flyers: Birds, Insects, and the Biomechanics of Flight.
Relevant Links:
David Alexander's faculty webpage
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Price: $26.95
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