bickford frederick wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2017 5:52 pm
http://www.dynamic-soaring-for-birds.co.uk
More later..
This website is complete garbage. Ignore it. The author and I have exchanged about 100 emails between mid June and mid July and nothing he said made any sense. For more detail see this discussion on this model-airplane website:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthre ... ring/page1 . I am "aeronaut999" in this discussion. Pay special attention to posts #1, 3, 14, 48, 51, 52, 54, and 55. Especially post #52
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpos ... stcount=52 and post #54
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpos ... stcount=54 . Post #14 pertains to a web page of the British Ornithologist's Union-- in the "comments" section, various people are responding to the author's work--
https://www.bou.org.uk/dynamic-soaring/ -- they all understand that it is without merit. It's a travesty that the author of this website is wasting the time and attention of serious people with this stuff. It's complete pseudoscience, vaporware, nothingness.
Basically what you have here is a man who claims to have 16,000 hours of flying time, who believes that an aircraft naturally tends to gain airspeed and/or altitude simply by turning to face the wind. Unbelievable. And he seems to be completely unable to see the most fundamental flaw in his ideas-- that they violate the principle Galilean Invariance-- i.e. they treat the ground as as special, privileged reference frame. When challenged on this point he'll give strange and nonsensical arguments on why his ideas supposedly don't suffer from this problem. This person and his website are a fascinating case study in psychology but contribute nothing to our understanding of the physics of flight.
If you don't believe it, just try to have an email conversation with him. His contact info is given on his website. You'll soon find out that it all adds up to nothing. At least if you start with a solid understanding of the basic physics of flight. If you think his ideas make sense, you had better reexamine your own understanding of basic physical principles.
Again see the recent discussion on the model-airplane website, as linked above, for much more in the way of specifics. See for example the math error detailed in post #52.
In the discussion on the British Ornithologist's Union webpage linked above, you'll find this quote from Mr. Taylor, the author of the website in question:
"Colin Taylor replies –
"These responses are very disappointing. All of their points are covered in detail in the dynamic-soaring-for-birds website. Anybody reading it will find a reasoned argument supported by mathematical analysis which is derived directly from the principles of conservation of energy and Newton's Laws of motion. Simply stating the contrary does not constitute a valid counter-argument.
"I stand by everything in the blog and the website. I am not making anything up. The mathematics speaks for itself.
"The only thing I am confused about is why people are so keen to cling to the wind-gradient theory which was invented in 1883, before people had any experience of gliding flight."
In other words, this man really and truly believes that he is "fighting the good fight". And he is completely and utterly mistaken. It doesn't take many minutes of looking at his webpage to begin finding error after error. Again see the discussion on the model-airplane website, linked above, for more.
I am not posting from my normal login because I have had some difficulties logging in since the recent website upgrade. My normal login is aeroexperiments. I'll try to get back onto that account soon.
Happy soaring
Sincerely, Steve Seibel