We watched an osprey hunt. There are four ponds here, and ponds on adjacent properties. Plenty to keep an osprey occupied for half an hour, circling, pausing, holding, circling more. He made a couple false drops, terminated before splashdown, without making any actual strikes. We’ve seen osprey snag trout out of steams in the high country. None from the ponds here so far. We know there are plenty of fish in the ponds. We can see them.
We saw another osprey, this one from the Naval Air Base outside Corpus Christi. It’s a vertical takeoff, tilt rotor, military airplane. It was in horizontal flight mode, big goofy helicopter propellers on the wings, wallowing around in circles over Corpus Christi Bay at about fifty miles an hour. Not an intimidating sight.
Talked to a neighbor, a retired pilot, about it. I commented on how slow it was flying in horizontal flight mode and he said the propellers in front of the wing produce enough movement over the airfoil to generate lift even at slow speeds. You can generate lift by blowing your own air over your wing?
Ooh. If that is true, then who needs all that complicated tilt rotor technology to create a vertical takeoff machine? All you need to do is blow enough air over your wings to create lift. Of course if you do that, you’re going to be pulling yourself forward, but that’s not a problem, blow some air the other way with propellers that don’t blow over the wing to stop the forward motion. How hard could it be? When you’re ready to go forward, just ease off the opposing propellers.
Here is what the real airplane, the Osprey, looks like (I didn’t actually take these pictures myself. I found them on the internet.)