How many types of wings are there? How can the shape of an aircraft’s wings affect its ability to fly? What is a vortex drag? There are plenty of questions surrounding the main question of “How can an aircraft fly?” (Or any object for that matter, but in this case we will be referring to aircrafts), and these questions are just some of them. Fortunately, we’ll have the answers right here!

Wings

There are different types of wings: round edged wings, sharp edged wings, rectangular wings, Delta wings, and so many more. All of this has its own purpose in terms of its effects of the aircraft’s abil-ity to fly. Some wings are larger than others while some are smaller. The angle of the wings during motion also affects the lift of the aircraft.

The wing’s rounded front divides the air that they’re flowing through evenly whether or not the wing is tilted at an angle. If a sharp wing is used, drag would increase which is something we would like to avoid.

However, a sharp rear edge is required to be on an aircraft as sharp edges allows high pressure air to stay below the wings. Sharp edges also allows high pressure air below the wings and low pres-sure air above the wings to rejoin smoothly.

The change in the angle of the wings during motion changes the angle of attack acting on the in-coming airflow. When the wing is tilted upwards, lift is increased, but airspeed is decreased and vice versa.

However, pilots must take into consideration the amount of tilt an aircraft can take as tilting the wing too far out would cause the aircraft to enter a stall and pose a danger towards the passengers inside the aircraft. To combat this situation, pilots can simply return the wing to its original (or to a more balanced) angle.

Have you ever looked out the window of an airplane during landing or take off (or at any given time during your flight) and seen the flaps of your airplane? You know that it’s important and is a vital part of the aircraft, but do you actually know what it is for?

The flaps of an aircraft’s wings alters the shape of the wing by changing the wing’s curvature and hence increases lift. These flaps are what keeps the aircraft balanced at all times and prevents the aircraft from accelerating or decelerating too quickly to the point that the pilot loses control of the aircraft. Although, these flaps allows the aircraft to have a steeper landing approach.These flaps are often what gives the aircraft a smooth landing!

Drag
What is drag, you may ask? Well, Drag can be defined as a force that is acting against the direc-tion of motion of any moving object with respect to a surrounding medium, which in this case is an aircraft flying through air. In other words, drag is a type of frictional force, the only difference be-tween drag and other frictional forces is that drag forces depends on velocity as compared to other frictional forces.

Now, let’s talk about parasite and induced drag. Parasite drag is drag force that is caused by outer structure of the aircraft itself such as its shape, its materials, etc. However, parasite drag isn’t as simple as that! There are 3 types of parasite drag: Skin Friction drag, Form drag, and Interference drag.

Skin friction drag, as you can probably guess, depends on the surface (or skin) of the aircraft. Smooth skin reduces skin friction drag, and vice versa. Form drag is due to the shape of the air-craft. It can also be referred to as pressure drag and it depends on the longitudinal section of the body.

Interference drag arises when there is a mix in the airflow streamlines with the airframe compo-nents such as the wings and the fuselage. This creates a localised shock wave that creates a drag force.

What about Induced drag? Induced drag, or lift-induced drag, occurs on the wings that separates the high pressure from the low pressure air to create lift. Induced drag can be found when wingtip vortices are formed as wingtip vortices reduces the wing’s ability to create lift and increases the drag force acting on the aircraft.

As a child, you must have seen an aircraft passing over your house and often times, you can see a trail behind the aircraft and joke around with your friends and family that the airplane is farting! These often occurs when an aircraft is passing through a cloud. These are called wing tip vortices which are spirals of air trailing behind the tip of an aircraft’s wing.

Wing tip vortices are highly common when the aircraft is flying at a slow speed such as during takeoff and landing. Tilting the wings of the aircraft doesn’t help either, it just creates greater vorti-ces and greater vortex drag.

Unfortunately, wing tip vortices are entirely unavoidable with wings of finite length. The only ways to reduce the effect of wing tip vortices and vortex drag on an aircraft would be to make it harder for high pressure air to leak towards the low pressure air above it by using winglets, however, this de-pends solely on the design of the wings of an aircraft.

Another way to reduces wing tip vortices is to not have wing tips! Too bad this design is not often used as wingtips serves its own purpose on the aircraft and its ability to fly. A way to prevent any accidents from occurring is to carefully calculate and estimate the amount of fuel required during the flight with additional consideration of vortex drag.

With all this in mind, we come to the question of why is it important to learn about wings and drag? Without understanding what drag is, or why different shapes and sizes of wings affects flight, we will be flying our aircraft less efficiently! We would need more fuel, which would undoubtedly increase costs, and increase our carbon footprint!