Flight Performance of Flying Fish
Flying fish really resembles to an airplane becasese it has wide pectoral, pelvic, and tail fins used as a main wing, a horizontal tail, and a vertical tail of an airplane, respectively. The analysis of flight perfomance was usually done by a recording from a ship. However, the flying fish flies to escape from threats such as a predator, so only the images from behind could be taken and thus the details of flight attitude was not clarified in detail. So, we are trying to record the flight of flying fish from air using a drone that can record the image from the above.
Drone（DJI Phantom2）
We use a drone above (DJI Phantom2) equipped with a mini-size video camera (GoPro Hero3). The drone takes off a ship and records sea surface from above. The recorded images were shown below.
Flying fish taxiing on the sea surface
Succesive picture of a flying flying fish
From these pictures, we can recognize the flight attitude of the flying fish. They taxied on the sea surface and spreaded out the fins to take off. The pectoral fins was spreaded out with a little sweepback angle. The flight speed was also analyzed using the moving speed of the flying fish on the recorded image and the flight speed of the drone equipped with the motion sensor.