An experimental Airbus concept shows airplanes flying in formation to save fuel. This concept carefully capitalizes on wake turbulence, which engineers have fought against for more than a century.
Recent research demonstrated that, although most wing shapes used today create turbulent wake vortices, wing geometrics can be designed to reduce or eliminate wingtip vortices almost entirely. In the ...
Birds are the undisputed masters of aerodynamics. No matter how many supercomputers and wind tunnels scientists throw at solving flight’s thorny calculations, they’ll never match the perfection of ...
A stunning video of an airplane taking off from the London-area Gatwick Airport shows a plane bursting through heavy fog, leaving an almost cartoonish gap in its wake as well as an impressive display ...
aircraft, part of the Autonomous Formation Flight (AFF) project based at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., flew the mission in early December. During the 96-minute flight, the ...
When Airbus in November announced it would demonstrate energy-saving automated formation flight in 2020 using two A350s, and Boeing subsequently revealed it had flight-tested the concept in 2018 with ...
When people want to talk about something unpleasant, they often invent nicer-sounding phrases to disguise what's really going on. "Wake turbulence" is the kind of term that can bring to mind vague, ...
Fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are huge priorities in the aviation industry – passenger airliners chew through amazing quantities of fuel. Take the Boeing 747, which guzzles somewhere ...
The study of vortex dynamics in fluid mechanics is critical for both advancing aeronautical design and minimising flow-induced hazards. At its core, vortex dynamics examines the formation, evolution, ...