Leonardo da Vinci designed an ornithopter, an aircraft intended to fly by flapping wings like a bird or bat.
Leonardo studied birds, bats, and the mechanics of flight in detail. His drawings show a human pilot lying face down and using pedals, levers, and a crank system to move large wings. The design was inspired more by bat wings than by feathered bird wings because a bat’s membrane could be represented by a lightweight frame and fabric.
Leonardo’s ornithopter was never built as a successful powered aircraft. Human muscles cannot provide enough sustained power to lift a person with the proposed mechanism. The design is therefore an important example of Renaissance engineering imagination rather than a working airplane.
An ornithopter differs from a helicopter, which uses rotating blades, and from a glider, which relies on lift without flapping propulsion. Leonardo’s studies helped establish the idea that flight could be analyzed through anatomy, physics, and mechanical design.