Birds have always been the inspiration for men when it comes to aviation. The Wright Brothers themselves spent a huge amount of time observing birds before achieving their first flight in 1903. Now researchers have been studying how birds avoid collisions. The birds have a simple rule: They always veer right when they get in each other’s way. The team ran experiments where pairs of budgerigars, small Australian parakeets, were set in flight from opposing ends of a tunnel. The birds were filmed with a high-speed camera as they flapped towards one another so the researchers could see how they avoided a crash. Using 10 different birds across 102 flights, not a single collision occurred, and the team says this is because they always veered to the right.
This article was originally published on September 30, 2016
