The 2011 Aerospace winner - FLAVIIR

People refer to flying as ’mastery of the air’. It might seem like a strange phrase – surely they mean mastery in the air? – but it’s literally true. Because what flying is really about is controlling the air, manipulating the pressure above and below to create lift, and changing the way that air flows around the body to manoeuvre.

Birds do it by flapping and changing the shape of their wings; insects do it by a complex interplay between different sets of wings that we don’t understand.

Aircraft, generally, do it with flaps, ailerons and rudders – control surfaces – attached to their wings, or in the case of helicopters, by changing the angle of the rotor blades. The mechanics are complicated, the moving parts numerous and the potential outcome of any of these systems failing catastrophic.

Doing away with control surfaces would reduce the complexity of aircraft considerably and also reduce the cost of maintaining all those complex mechanics. But without them, how would the aircraft fly? How would it gain its mastery of the air?