Leonardo da Vinci designed an ornithopter with a frame inspired by a bat’s wings.
An ornithopter is a flying machine intended to fly by flapping wings rather than by using a propeller or a fixed wing. Leonardo studied birds and bats and produced several winged-machine sketches, including designs with articulated wings and mechanisms for a pilot to operate them.
His drawings show careful attention to wing shape, joints, cables, and the relationship between muscular effort and flight. The central difficulty was power: human muscles cannot produce enough sustained energy to lift a person with a machine of the kind Leonardo envisioned. Consequently, no reliable evidence shows that his full-size ornithopters flew.
This subject is distinct from Leonardo’s rotating aerial-flight device, which is usually discussed as a separate screw-based concept. Both belong to his studies of aviation, but they rely on different aerodynamic ideas.