#TGFF (The Grounds For Flight) --- SynTalk

What do you expect to see on windy islands? Can you soar? Are there a finite number of ways of flying? Did we glide before flying? Do birds & insects fly like planes, & vice versa? How are the lift-off forces and moments generated? Was the Wright Flyer I (which made the first sustained manned flight in 1903) actually a very bad design? Do flies fly merely by seeing? Are wings thermo-regulatory devices? Why has flying evolved several times across different species? How many times of its own weight can flying structures take? How should flying carpets be made? Does it matter to the moth what the value of ‘g’ is? How might dragonfly wingspan change with atmospheric oxygen content? Can airplanes fly like sharks swim? Why shiver? How are/would the helicopters that fly on Mars (be) different? How will a balloon inflate on Venus? Are biological flyers far more efficient than the human engineered ones – how? Do birds and insects of the same size fly similarly? How are unmanned and manned systems different? Why don’t we have faster commercial flights (given they are possible)? Can one expect to see new ways and manners of flying? Will we ‘fly’ to Mars at some point? &, is there still a lot of ground to cover? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from aeronautical engineering (Prof. Rajkumar Pant, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & neurobiology & physiology (Prof. Sanjay Sane, NCBS, Bangalore). Listen in...