Michael Dickinson Quotes

Although their maneuverability is limited, blind flies can fly remarkably well.

For many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display.

To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.

A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man.

When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down.

The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.

Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.

We weren't built to fly. We can do it, but we shouldn't be surprised if it feels a little unnatural.

We discovered that fruit flies alter course in less than one one-hundredth of a second, 50 times faster than we blink our eyes, which is faster than we ever imagined.

The pilot looked at his cues of attitude and speed and orientation and so on and responded as he would from the same cues in an airplane, but there was no way it flew the same. The simulators had showed us that.

Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.

And from a poise at this station the plane may swoop down, at great disadvantage if close to the back of the wave, at various slopes and directions till it cuts into the air that is being raised by the face of the following wave, which again enables it to resume its velocity.

There's so many mysteries related to how flies are able to make their way through the world. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about how their brain works. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about just how they're put together. I mean, these animals are basically, topologically, spheres. They don't have bones as we do, of course.

The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly.

The airplane stays up because it doesn't have the time to fall.

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.

We returned home, after these experiments, with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds.

They [Erasers] were bad fliers," Angel chimed in, "And in their minds, they weren't all kill the mutants, like they usually are. They were like, remember to flap!

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

My company mascot is the bumblebee. Because of its tiny wings and heavy body, aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. But the bumblebee doesn't know that, so it flies anyways.

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.

The midge's wing beats to and fro A thousand times ere one can utter O.

To speak of this subject you must... explain the nature of the resistance of the air, in the second the anatomy of the bird and its wings, in the third the method of working the wings in their various movements, in the fourth the power of the wings and the tail when the wings are not being moved and when the wind is favourable to serve as guide in various movements.

For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.