To our knowledge, this work is the first numerical study of the effect of a lateral gust on the performance of a three-dimensional flapping wing in hover.

We have numerically investigated and demonstrated that there is a considerable rolling moment caused by the difference in the lifts generated by a wing oriented toward incoming wind gust and the same wing oriented away from the wind direction, thus indicating that a biological or robotic flyer can lose control during moderate side gusts.

It has been shown numerically that small-scale flapping-wing MAVs are susceptible to moderate downward gusts, while they can alleviate the effect of moderate or even strong frontal gusts whose mean velocity is comparable with the wing tip velocity.