How fast can a dragonfly fly?

Answer

Dear Cis,

Dragonflies are very agile and fast fliers. How they succeed in doing so is being extensively researched, because it is hoped that with the knowledge about flying dragonflies, applications can also be developed that are useful for human aviation. However, the study of flying dragonflies is not easy! Quite a lot of highly specialized scientific articles were published about it. From that I got the following:

In general, dragonflies can travel up to 100 times their body length per second (= maximum speed). So a dragonfly of, for example, 5 cm long, can in principle travel 100 x 5 cm = 500 cm = 5 m per second. But this is a maximum speed and that speed will also depend on the conditions in which the dragonfly has to fly. Anyway, 5 m/s is of course very fast, because you do the math: there are 60 seconds in a minute, so a 5 cm dragonfly can travel 60 s x 5 m/s = 300 m or 18 km per minute in one minute. hour! Dragonflies that are larger than 5 cm can of course fly much faster and reach flight speeds of 10 m/s (36 km per hour)! It may not surprise you then that dragonflies are considered to be the fastest flying insects. One species, Austrophlebia costalis, is even claimed in an old scientific book (Robert Tillyard “The biology of dragonflies (Odonata or Paraneuroptera)” published in 1917) to reach almost 60 miles per hour, which is almost 97 km per hour. hour! If this observation were correct, then this is the world record of flying fast among the dragonflies and even among the insects. However, there are reasonable doubts as to whether the speed measurement reported by Tillyard’s book is correct.

Among the Belgian dragonfly species whose flight speed I have been able to find in the scientific literature is the brown glazier (Aeschna grandis), which can reach a flight speed of about 1 m/s. This is less than the speed limit I mentioned above, but it still remains an impressive speed of 3.6 km per hour! The flight speed of the blood-red dragonfly (Sympetrum sanguineum) is even better, because this species reaches 1.31 m/s (4.7 km per hour).

On average, damselflies fly slightly slower than dragonflies (glaziers), but the meadow damselfly (Calopteryx splendens) is also doing its best, because it reaches a flight speed of up to 0.94 m/s (3.4 km per hour).

Below is another video about dragonfly flying and links to two websites with more information about dragonfly flight speeds (unfortunately in English).

I hope this answered your question.

Many greetings,

Thierry Backeljau