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All is not bad however, in the land of apping wings. Low Reynolds Number : At small aircraft sizes (wing spans of less than 3 m), where the Reynolds number (a measure of the amount of resistance in the form of friction that the air has to the motion of the aircraft) is very small, it turns out that apping wings are more ecient. This is because lift and drag (the force that resists the force of the engine) are strongly dependent on the friction between the wing and the air. The lower the friction, the lower the drag. This is not as simple as Im making it out to be and there might be a separate post on Reynolds numbers soon. The important point is that apping is that apping is more ecient for smaller wing spans. No wonder birds are much smaller than aircraft then! Agility: At even smaller aircraft sizes (think insects and hummingbirds), apping oers far greater agility provided the frequency of apping is really high. The hummingbird, for example can ap at more than 50 beats per second. It can accelerate and stop rapidly, jumping from ower to ower while hovering seemingly eortlessly while it feeds. Diculty of natural propeller design: Though apping is the way to go for very small aircraft, there exists a large overlap between birds and current aircraft where the separate-wing-and-engine is clearly more ecient. The problem for evolution is that no design was presented to it that allowed for an arrangement of bones that could rotate around an axis. Thus, propeller design was kind of excluded naturally. Evolutionary considerations: Its not that apping wings are not optimal even for the intermediate spans that I just mentioned above. They are just optimized (well, if you can call evolution optimization) for a dierent purpose. Fixed wing aircraft dont have to fold their wings, go back into their nest and feed their young every day.