Like the title says. I know Falcons and raptors can dive at 200+ mph. So when they spread their wings to slow down how do they handle the insane force that they would be experiencing?
In: 160
They don’t spread their wings.
They move one feather on each side ever so slightly, which gradually levels them out.
Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
A peregrine falcon only weighs about 2 lbs. The forces on a 2 lb bird are just not that high compared to the strength of their body. And if you watch videos of them attacking, they seem to have leveled out a bit before the actual strike. In this video, at about the 2:10 mark, you can see the falcon who has leveled out, and the kill strike is actually horizontal, so it should beg going much slower that 200mph at this time. The 200mph dive is just used to perform an ambush.
Falcons weigh between .75 and 2 pounds. They’re aren’t carrying 100s or 1000s of gallons of fuel. And their wings are short compared to a plane. As you scale down from a plane to a bird, I don’t think the required structural strength scales linearly, but at some other rate, so a bird that is 1/100 the size of a plane only needs 1/500th of the structural strength.
Or something like that. Someone can fill in with real numbers…..
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