No flapping required: can drones learn to ride the wind?

September 23, 2025

We don’t often stray from the tarmac. Our natural habitat is wheels-on-ground: buses, trucks, vans, bakkies, and the odd train that actually runs on time. But every so often, a story flaps into our inbox that’s too good not to share – like this one.

Have you ever wondered how birds can soar gracefully through the air for long periods without flapping their wings? The answer lies in temperature, wind patterns, and the way air moves up and down in the atmosphere. A coalition that includes researchers from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is using these insights from bird flight to develop uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS), or drone technology, that can save energy and fly more efficiently.

The coalition – charmingly named Albatross – is trying to figure out how the UAS can copy birds and soar rather than flap. The premise is beautifully simple: if a feathered creature can cruise for ages by surfing rising air, perhaps a drone can, too – saving energy, extending range and generally acting less like a flying brick with a GoPro.

Leading the work is Dr John Bird, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at UTEP and an expert in the science of soaring. Bird (that’s really his name; we didn’t make it up) is studying the pockets of rising and descending air created as the sun warms the ground. Think of this as a hot-air balloon’s budget cousin: heat goes in at the surface, warm air whooshes up, and anything that descends slower than that updraft can hang about for free. Birds knit these invisible escalators together, gliding from one to the next and expending almost no energy in the process.

It sounds quite simple, doesn’t it? Alas, that elegant trick is infuriatingly hard to teach a machine. As Bird notes, these up- and downdraughts are small, short-lived, and random. They’re the sort of atmospheric mischief that won’t appear in your favourite weather app. So, Albatross is trying to teach the drone to sense the air, predict the gain, and choose a path that sips rather than slurps power.

UTEP’s Dr Afroza Shirin, a co-investigator, points out that the idea isn’t new – glider pilots have been doing it for a century and certain seabirds for a few million years. But tuning it for drones that must travel long distances without lugging a small power station on board would be a huge achievement.

The Albatross team includes partners at Mississippi State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and yes, the bird of the project’s name is famous for crossing oceans with minimal flapping. As Bird quips, “Albatross are terrible at flapping their wings.” Which is precisely the point: if your flapping is rubbish, learn to glide brilliantly.

We’ll leave the aerodynamics to the clever people, but the idea of making machines thriftier by reading the environment rather than bullying it sounds like a seriously good idea.