Winglets are for .... Parking Airplanes

LOL, when I read, “my textbook” and saw what it was, I thought you were Dick Shevell himself. Looked it up and saw he sadly passed away in 2000. I was in the Aero Dept. at Stanford back in the day, when he was there, and of course he is older than I am.

No doubt these are basic aerodynamic (and more generally, fluid) principles. Thanks for highlighting the simplified explanations in this thread.

Although the general principles exist as guidance, very often more complex modifications can provide surprising results.

An example might be one of Shevell’s inventions - vortilons. Those can be seen as related to the whale wing bumps that are something of an innovation in foils lately.

We are looking at the wrong type of airplane wings? Instead of heavily loaded airliner wings, with fuel tanks, flying Mach 0.9, we should instead be looking at glider (sailplane) wings?

They also have winglets. But maybe they are artificially span-limited also?

2 Likes

AR 22 foils would be hard to ride but I bet you’d go so fast