Flyingfish

We all know about those birds which are just at home in the water as they are in the air, however, not too many species of fish can say the same thing. Flying fish can actually stay up in the air for more than half a minute, and can glide as far as 400 meters and reach speeds of up to 70 kilometers per hour!

A mechanical engineer from Seoul National University in Korea, Haecheon Choi, took a shine to the flying fish as he was reading a science book to his children. By coming to the realization that flying fish actually FLY, he and his collegue, Hyungmin Park, set about to figure out just how these fish stay up in the air so long and then publish their discovery in The Journal of Experimental Biology, which they did this past 10th of September. They had some remarkable results in tsts conducted in a wind tunnel of all places.. They found that the flying fish were just as efficient at gliding as birds were, and more effective than many forms of insects at it.

Now that Choi and Park have proven to the world that flying fish are exceptional fliers, they are now setting up for their next big task.. Building an aircraft which will exploit the ground effect aerodynamics which flying fish use to their benefit.