In June 2000, I asked him whether falcons had anything to teach aeronautical engineers. Crowder lamented the aviation industry’s lack of interest in bird flight, particularly peregrine flight. Jim Crowder, a Boeing engineer and leading authority on airflow dynamics who died last year, was one of the few aerospace professionals who paid attention. Frightful also stars in Birds of Prey, a yet-to-be-released IMAX film produced by Roy Disney.īut while Franklin and his raptor have caught the attention of the entertainment world, aeronautical engineers and other technical types have largely ignored them. The team spent a couple of months working out these techniques and training Frightful, then another seven weeks shooting the film, which aired on the National Geographic Explorer program in 2002 and was nominated for an Emmy award. A fourth altimeter was packed into the lure, and all four altimeters were compared after each jump. Then he leaps, and they fall together for more than two miles, along with a lure that Franklin drops during the descent to simulate prey.įranklin’s team verified Frightful’s dive velocities with measurements from altimeters worn by videographer Kent and Franklin himself as they plummeted alongside the bird. She flies just off the wingtip, keeping her sharp eye on Franklin, inside the airplane, as he prepares to dive out the door. She stabilizes immediately into level flight and matches the speed of the airplane. It’s an improbable and wonderful sight to witness Franklin release Frightful into the slipstream of a Cessna 172 at 17,000 feet above sea level. During dozens of skydives in 1999, made while the National Geographic film Terminal Velocity was being shot, the device recorded Frightful’s stooping speeds by measuring how far she fell in a certain time interval. They stripped down a skydiver’s Pro-Track recording altimeter/computer, usually worn like a wristwatch, to a computer chip weighing just 0.4 ounce, then fastened it to the underside of Frightful’s tail feathers in a way that wouldn’t interfere with her flying. To capture their unique data, Franklin and a few mathematicians and engineers devised an elaborate method of clocking falcons in mid-dive. “Can human flight benefit from these observations?” he asks. After you know what to look for, you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.”įranklin first took the controls of an airplane at age nine, and now, as a pilot for Federal Express, he would like to see the knowledge he has gained skydiving with Frightful and other fast-flying birds applied to mechanized flight. In 1941 he wrote, “Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician. “Birds are the blueprint for aeronautical engineering,” says Franklin, a 46-year-old pilot and master falconer from Friday Harbor, Washington. To understand how a two-pound bird can achieve higher speeds than most small airplanes, Franklin has done more than 200 skydives, sometimes as many as five a day, with Frightful. That didn’t discourage Franklin, his wife Suzanne, his father Roy Franklin (a World War II Navy Corsair pilot), several other falconers, two film crews, and Norman Kent, a world-renowned skydiving videographer, from their plan to study a speeding falcon at arm’s length-literally. Yet entering any predator’s realm, even just to observe, entails certain risks-Frightful’s sharp talons and bill are, of course, designed to hold and tear flesh. “Studying falcons from the ground is like studying sharks from a boat,” Franklin says. No one had ever measured exactly how fast the birds can fly until Ken Franklin started stooping with Frightful, or, more to the point, Frightful learned to skydive with Ken. Until recently, estimates of peregrines’ velocity varied wildly, from 70 to 300 mph.
When Frightful is stooping-diving after prey-from nearly three miles up, she has been clocked at 242 mph, and it’s possible she can go faster. Cheetahs, sailfish, and black cutworm moths all top out at about 70 mph.
She ignores a savory piece of barbecued chicken, even though it’s within easy reach.įrightful is a world-class athlete whose directly recorded speed beats that of any other animal ever measured. Sixteen inches long and weighing 2.2 pounds, she catches other birds, up to the size of ducks, in midair for a living. She flaps her wings and stretches a little, then preens herself with her hooked beak.
#Peregrine falcon speed 247 lure full#
Frightful, a six-year-old peregrine falcon, is just being herself, loudly cacking and occasionally opening her wings to their full 41-inch span. SHE PERCHES ON A BALD CESSNA TIRE in Ken and Suzanne Franklin’s country kitchen.
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