Planes, flying dinosaurs and feathered “cameramen”

HIGH FLYERS ... NMMU marketing and corporate relations staff flew to Sun City today for the Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Conference.

By Guest Blogger (Nicky Willemse)

A whole bunch of staff from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s marketing and corporate relations team boarded the 6.10am flight to Joburg this morning, en route to Sun City for this year’s Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Conference.

One of them was particularly nervous about the flight, which got me thinking about flying in general. I’m super-relaxed about flying (I even enjoy a bit of turbulence) but it does still baffle me that these massive machines are able to defy gravity and travel through the sky.

Though I write dozens of articles about science, my brain is more wired to English than engineering, and the technology that enables man to fly is nothing short of a modern miracle (well, to me, at least).

While I was contemplating modern flight, I couldn’t help calling to mind an article I wrote recently on ancient flight – or, rather, one of the earliest fliers – which one of NMMU’s scientists recently helped to put back in the sky.

Archaeopteryx, a 150-million-year-old prehistoric bird, was long thought to be the first flying bird. A fossil of the bird was discovered in Germany way back in 1861. It had feathers similar to a bird, but teeth, claws and a long bony tail like a reptile, so was widely accepted as evidence of the evolutionary transition from reptiles to birds.

But then in 2010, two British scientists produced a paper which said the early bird couldn’t fly after all. They said its main feather shaft would have been too weak for powered flight.

But NMMU’s Prof Theagarten “Solly” Lingham-Soliar, a biomechanist-palaeontologist, has put paid to this theory. He believes the foam core (essentially air-filled cells) that forms the central shaft of all flight feathers in birds was crucial to the increased strength of the feather shafts in Archaeopteryx, which were slightly thinner than those of modern birds.

“The principle of the foam is to take bending stresses but without the weight of a solid … Mechanical tests by many of the top physicists, including most recently, German scientists Ingrid Weiss and Helmet Kirchner [from the Liebniz Institute of New Materials in Saarbrucken, Germany] show that the foam core absorbs 96% of the load (buckling) imposed on the feather during flight.

“It probably wouldn’t have been the best of fliers but rather shows the beginnings of flight,” said the Prof.

So Archaeopteryx has recaptured the sky once again.

Archaeopteryx, the early bird that theorists in 2010 said couldn't fly. 

This got me thinking about modern birds and how scientists are conducting research related to their flight.

NMMU’s Dr Pierre Pistorius, a senior lecturer in Zoology, is running a long-term monitoring programme on the Cape gannets on Bird Island. As part of this project, tiny video cameras have been attached onto the backs of the birds to see how they observe and interact with their environment.

He hopes the video footage will enable a better understanding of these birds, and also provide some insight into why this particular population of Cape gannets (which is the largest population of this species in the world) is growing, while other populations are declining.

So scientists are able to tag along for the flight, thanks to this cutting edge technology.

Planes, the first bird, modern technology wired up to modern birds … all pretty amazing really.

Where will flight be a century from now? And how will scientists be conducting research relating to flight? Just the thought of all this, and the possibilities that no doubt are just waiting to be discovered, baffles this non-engineering mind even more!

Cape gannets on Bird Island