Trusted by millions of consumers Airlines With their lives every day, but a few passengers understand how these massive flying tubes work stay in the air and why they look the way they look. I don’t remember jets having winglets as a child, but on a recent business trip I noticed winglets on all planes in Airport. Winglets are the vertical tips of an aircraft’s wings that perform several crucial functions.
Winglets reduce the plane aerodynamic drag by about 5 percent by reducing vortices, or swirling wind, around the edge of the aircraft’s wing. These vortices are created when air flowing along the wings of an aircraft curves upwards, as a high-pressure zone forms under the wing and a low-pressure zone forms above the wing. When these two opposing pressure systems form and the air moves towards the wing tip, a miniature one is created tornado which causes drag and wastes energy. Winglets prevent the high-pressure airflow from under the wing from entering the low-pressure airflow on top of the wing, thereby reducing drag. According to CNN,
In 1897, British aerodynamicist Frederick W. Lancaster patented “wing end plates”, which were vertical surfaces placed at the tips of wings to prevent airflow from touching the bottom to the top, thus reducing drag. “End plates behave similarly to winglets in many respects, but the lift improvement is rather delicate because flat plates themselves are not very good aerodynamic surfaces,” explains Bowers.
The idea was refined for newfangled aircraft in the 1970s by NASA engineer Richard Whitcomb, who imagined vertical wing extensions inspired by the way, birds tuck their wingtips when they need assist.
Whitcomb tested the idea in a wind tunnel and found that winglets could achieve a drag reduction of about 5%. At the same time, winglet research was being conducted independently of NASA, and business jet manufacturer LearJet was the first to install winglets on a real aircraft in 1977. Two years later, NASA first flew an Air Force KC-135 test plane – not too different from a Boeing 707 airliner – equipped with three-meter-high winglets. During 47 test flights, NASA confirmed Whitcomb’s findings in the wind tunnel.
Winglets can now be found on most miniature and medium-sized aircraft in the world, but… larger planes operate raked wingtips, which swing back more dramatically than the rest of the wing. These swept wingtips are more competent for larger aircraft and still provide comparable wingtip vortex suppression properties and comparable fuel savings compared to winglets. In addition to saving fuel, both winglets and swept wingtips improve the plane’s directional stability, reducing the plane’s susceptibility to turbulence.
These seemingly elementary improvements in aviation have saved billions of gallons of fuel, which means greater savings for airlines and lower carbon dioxide emissions when traveling by plane. These little wings serve a great purpose, and the next time you fly, you can attack your neighbors in a row with this little tidbit.
