Notes on Flight v1.11

The current version of Flight for Windows is available as a free download from:

http://detritus.inhs.uiuc.edu/wes/pennycuick.html

Version 1.11 is about 26 MB. It may get a bit bigger, as more features are added in future versions.

Please be sure to install the program in C:\Program Files, otherwise it may not be able to find files that it needs.

European users: Please set your computer to use decimal points, not commas. If your computer is set to use commas, the program may appear to work, but it will give wrong results!

Flight for Windows replaces the earlier QBasic program Flight.bas, which was itself developed from a set of three programs originally published in:

C.J. Pennycuick (1989) Bird Flight Performance. Oxford University Press.

The Power Curve and Glide Polar calculations in Flight for Windows are essentially the same as those in Flight.bas. These are performance "snapshots" of a bird with a particular mass, wing span and wing area. The Migration calculation is new in Flight for Windows, and computes changes in performance during a long migratory flight, taking account of the consumption of fat, and of protein from the flight muscles and other tissues. The basis of this calculation was described in:

C.J. Pennycuick (1998) Computer simulation of fat and muscle burn in long-distance bird migration. J. Theoretical Biology 191, 47-61.

Some details of the calculation have been elaborated, especially the method of determining the air speed, for which a new "Maximum Range" option has been added in Version 1.11. Please read the Help screens, which give details and background for the various calculations.

Literature citations: When using results calculated with this program please mention that you used Flight for Windows, and just embed the website address (above) in your text. This seems to work, at least with some journals.

Bug reports would be appreciated. Please send them to:

colin_at_pennycuick.u-net.com (replacing _at_ with @)

Colin Pennycuick, Bristol March 2002.