What Leonardo da Vinci invention used wings modeled on a bird’s flight?

Leonardo da Vinci’s bird-inspired flying machine was an ornithopter. An ornithopter is an aircraft designed to fly by flapping wings, rather than relying mainly on fixed wings or a spinning rotor.

Leonardo studied birds, bats, and the movement of their wings while developing several flying-machine designs in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. His sketches show a pilot lying or standing inside a lightweight wooden framework and operating wings through pedals, levers, and pulleys.

The design was not successfully built and flown in Leonardo’s lifetime. Human muscles alone cannot provide enough sustained power for a large flapping aircraft, a problem that early aviation designers often underestimated.

Leonardo’s ornithopter is sometimes confused with his aerial screw, which used a helical rotor concept. The ornithopter’s defining feature is wing flapping modeled on animal flight.