Researchers have crunched the numbers to develop extremely efficient wings and fins that could help future flying and swimming drones.
Fixed-wing aircraft have been all the rage the past century or so but such winged flying machines are hardly the only way to do it. Rotary aircraft like helicopters are amazing machines as well and fill a much needed niche that even many VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) craft cannot. The first attempts at winged flight are lost in the contrails of time but there were surely were many misguided attempts over the centuries and even millennia. There had to be some caveman named Grog or Atouk who died jumping out of a tree feverishly flapping his arms in an attempt to fly (hopefully before he added his genes to our gene-pool).
