Scientists from Sweden have found a bird that can fly in the air for almost a year and that too without landing. Known as the common swift, it is a small, dark-feathered bird which can fly for the said time without landing, the longest time spent aloft by any known bird. The findings in the US journal Current Biology confirmed a 46-year-old hypothesis, first offered by British researcher Ron Lockley, that these birds spend most of their lives in the air. A team of researchers from Sweden fitted tiny backpacks on 13 of the brownish-black birds. Weighing only one gram, these microdata logs recorded whether the birds were in the air or not, their acceleration, and where they had been at any given time. Those who did stop did so only briefly, and spent 99.5 percent of the 10 months in the air. The birds catch food while in flight, according to the study. Researchers said they still don’t know if or how the birds sleep during this time, but suggested that they might catch a few winks when they fly to high altitudes each day at dawn and dusk, and then slowly descend. The common swift is a medium-sized bird, superficially similar to the barn swallow or house martin but somewhat larger. It is, however, completely unrelated to those passerine species, since swifts are in the separate order Apodiformes.