A brief history of Leonardo da Vinci's aircraft designs
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02.03.2025
Leonardo da Vinci, artist, scientist, musician and engineer is without a doubt one of the most famous people of all time.
Italian born da Vinci has managed to combine his gifts for extraordinarily creative work. Da Vinci was obsessed with flying and conceptualized several different machines. While many of his designs languished in his notebook as their builds were impossible in da Vinci's lifetime, he did manage to build a flying machine resembling a helicopter.
Da Vinci's machine was powered by four men that would turn the screw type rotor. It did not work because the body of the machine itself rotated in the opposite direction to the rotor
Leonardo da Vinci made the first real studies of flight in the 1480s. He had over 200 drawings and sketches that illustrated his theories on flight. His ornithopter flying machine was an aircraft that would fly by flapping its wings, a design he created to show how humans could fly. It even had a sophisticated flight control system; however, this design was never built by the designer.
Yet, as one of da Vinci's most famous inventions, the ornithopter displays his powers of observation and imagination, as well as his enthusiasm for the potential of flight. The design for this invention is clearly inspired by the flight of winged animals, which da Vinci hoped to replicate. In his notes, he mentions bats, kites, and birds as sources of inspiration. In mythology, the idea of constructing wings in order to resemble the flight of bird's dates to the ancient Greek legend of Daedalus (Greek demigod engineer) and Icarus (Daedalus's son).
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