“There’s a simple rule for slowing back down: It’s going back to being symmetric. You don’t have to try anything special,” said Hedrick. “What we have here is a shortcut rule for stability.”

Hedrick and his colleagues universalised the principle when they noticed similarity between the flapping motions of hummingbirds and fruit flies. They studied nine types of creatures, including a hummingbird, a cockatoo, a bat and four species of insects, and all used FCT. “The model also shows how animals may simultaneously specialise in both maneuverability and stability,” Hedrick and his colleagues wrote.
Scientists had thought that stopping a turn in flight might require a much more elaborate physical process, and, commensurately, a lot more brainpower. There’s not a lot of acreage in a bird’s brain, much less a mosquito’s brain, so finding out that these creatures used a shortcut made sense.

“That’s the cool thing,” said Mark Willis, who studies the neurobiology of animal flight at Case Western Reserve University and was not part of the Hedrick research team. “We thought this was going to be really complicated. And it turns out that it’s not that complicated. And the animal’s brain doesn’t have to do all this computation—it comes out of the mechanics of flight, basically.”
To study comparative biomechanics (how different animals do what they do), scientists shoot video at 1,000 frames per second (for a hummingbird) and 4,000 frames per second (for a fruit fly).

The research may seem esoteric, but there are civilian and military applications for small, robotic flying machines.

... contd.