Charles Porter Ellington was born on December 31st 1952 in the State of Maryland, grew up there and in the State of Georgia, and gained his first degree at Duke University, North Carolina, all in the USA. Under the leadership of Steven Vogel and Stephen Wainwright, Duke at that time was the hub of biomechanics in the USA, and several of Charlie’s near contemporaries went on to establish influential laboratories on other US campuses. He took a different route, coming to Cambridge in 1972 on a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to work for a PhD under the supervision of Torkel Weis-Fogh, a brilliant Dane who was then the world leader in insect flight research. Weis-Fogh had recently broken new ground in aerodynamics. Using high-speed cinematography of the tiny wasp Encarsia formosa in free flight, he had described the first non-steady state mechanism for generating high lift by flapping wings. Charlie’s remit was to develop and extend this approach to other insect groups and to work towards a greater understanding of the aerodynamics of hovering flight. Disaster struck soon after, when Weis-Fogh took his own life. Charlie’s supervision was taken over by Ken Machin, a radio-astronomer turned zoologist whose outstanding experimental flair lay behind much important research in Cambridge at that time. The result was a PhD thesis that must rank among the most remarkable in the history of the degree, and spectacularly demonstrated what the disciplinary breadth of the American undergraduate system could achieve in an outstanding student. Building his own digitiser and using a computer the size of a wardrobe Charlie developed the first methodology and software for kinematic analysis of unimpeded flapping flight, and applied them to his own high-speed films of a range of hovering insects. He identified five new unsteady mechanisms for lift generation, and, crucially, was the first person to develop a vortex theory for flapping flight. He developed and extended the use of morphometric parameters in calculating aerodynamic and inertial forces and power requirements of flight. The work was published virtually intact in 1984 in a seminal series of six papers in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, and established the platform on which virtually all subsequent research on insect flight mechanics has been built. Now on the staff at Cambridge, Charlie replaced Weis-Fogh as the recognised world leader in insect flight mechanics. An excellent theoretician as well as a first-rate experimentalist, he began a programme of research and publications with a succession of postgraduates and post-doctoral assistants, primarily addressing the nature and relative importance of unsteady mechanisms in

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Charlie Ellington (1952-2019) – 动物飞行力学方面的职业

查尔斯·波特·艾灵顿 (Charles Porter Ellington) 于 1952 年 12 月 31 日出生在马里兰州，在佐治亚州长大，并在美国北卡罗来纳州杜克大学获得了第一个学位。在 Steven Vogel 和 Stephen Wainwright 的领导下，当时的杜克大学是美国生物力学的中心，查理的几位近代人继续在美国其他校园建立有影响力的实验室。他选择了不同的路线，于 1972 年获得著名的丘吉尔奖学金来到剑桥，在 Torkel Weis-Fogh 的指导下攻读博士学位，Torkel Weis-Fogh 是一位才华横溢的丹麦人，当时是昆虫飞行研究的世界领导者。Weis-Fogh 最近在空气动力学领域开辟了新天地。使用自由飞行的小黄蜂 Encarsia formosa 的高速摄影，他描述了第一个通过扑翼产生高升力的非稳态机制。Charlie 的职责是开发并将这种方法扩展到其他昆虫群体，并致力于更好地了解悬停飞行的空气动力学。不久之后，Weis-Fogh 自杀了，灾难降临了。查理的监督由肯·马钦接管，肯·马钦是一名射电天文学家，后来转为动物学家，他杰出的实验天赋是当时剑桥许多重要研究的幕后推手。结果是一篇博士论文必须在学位历史上名列前茅，并壮观地展示了美国本科系统的学科广度可以在一名优秀学生身上取得的成就。建立自己的数字化仪并使用衣柜大小的计算机，查理开发了第一种方法和软件，用于无阻碍扑翼飞行的运动学分析，并将它们应用于他自己的一系列盘旋昆虫的高速电影。他确定了五种新的升力产生的非定常机制，并且至关重要的是，他是第一个提出扑翼飞行涡流理论的人。他开发并扩展了形态测量参数在计算空气动力和惯性力以及飞行功率要求中的应用。这项工作于 1984 年在英国皇家学会哲学汇刊 B 上发表了六篇开创性的系列论文，几乎完整无缺，并建立了一个平台，几乎所有后来的昆虫飞行力学研究都建立在这个平台上。现在在剑桥的工作人员，Charlie 取代 Weis-Fogh 成为昆虫飞行力学领域公认的世界领导者。作为一名优秀的理论家和一流的实验家，他开始了与一系列研究生和博士后助理的研究和出版物计划，主要解决非稳态机制的性质和相对重要性