Leonardo da Vinci sketched an ornithopter as a flying machine with wings intended to imitate a bird’s motion.
His notebooks show several studies of bird flight and wing mechanics. The proposed machine used human power to move wings, reflecting Leonardo’s belief that careful observation of nature could guide engineering. It was a design study rather than a successfully tested aircraft.
An ornithopter is any aircraft that flies by flapping wings, whereas a helicopter generates lift with rotating blades and a parachute descends by drag. Leonardo’s drawings therefore belong to the history of aviation concepts, not to powered flight in the modern sense.
The machine’s practical weakness was its power source: human muscles cannot provide enough sustained energy for a large flapping aircraft. Even so, Leonardo’s anatomical and aerodynamic observations influenced later interest in human flight.