Aerobatics of flying saucers (Q2181970)

This extraordinary paper describes an elementary mechanical system (the ``flying saucer''), with three different constraints imposed on its control system. The authors show by explicit computation that these nonholonomic constraints give explicit mechanical models of the three generalized flag varieties of the exceptional simple Lie group \(G_2\), in its noncompact real form. They use their mechanical modelling to construct explicitly the fibrations of the \(6\)-dimensional \(G_2\)-flag variety over its two \(5\)-dimensional quotients.