The Flying Machine

Overview

While the On Flight page provides context and analysis, this page presents Leonardo's own words on the flying machine — his technical observations, design notes, and engineering reasoning as recorded in the notebooks. These passages come primarily from the Codex Atlanticus and supplement the Codex on the Flight of Birds.

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.

C.A. 161 r. a

The life which resides in the bird's members will be more in conformity with their needs than that of man which is separated from them, and especially in the almost imperceptible movements which produce equilibrium. But since we see that the bird is equipped for many obvious varieties of movements, we are able from this experience to declare that the most rudimentary of these movements will be capable of being comprehended by man's understanding; and that he will to a great extent be able to provide against the destruction of that instrument of which he has himself become the living principle and the propeller.

C.A. 161 r. a

Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat, because its membranes serve as an armour or rather as a means of binding together the pieces of its armour, that is the framework of the wings.

And if you take as your pattern the wings of feathered birds, these are more powerful in structure of bone and sinew because they are pervious, that is to say the feathers are separated from one another and the air passes through them. But the bat is aided by its membrane, which binds the whole together and is not pervious.

C.A. 129 v. a

The wing ought not to have its inner extremity all of one piece, for if the wing beat the air coming forward, the wing finding itself all of one piece could not press the air between itself and the chest of the man. And it is necessary that when the wing pushes the air with the front surface of itself the rear surface should not press the air in the opposite direction.

C.A. 276 v. b

If you should test this instrument upon a lake you should provide yourself with a long wineskin as a girdle so that in case of a fall you will not be drowned.

C.A.

You will experiment with this instrument over a lake, and you will wear attached to your girdle a long wineskin, so that if you fall in you will not be drowned.