These findings can be enormously important for the future of the aviation industry. Climate change makes weather conditions more unpredictable and more serious. In the past four decades, the frequency of extreme turbulence events has increased by 55 percent. To guarantee the safety of passengers, aircraft must become more resilient and be able to perform agile maneuvers in challenging circumstances without jeopardizing the stability of aircraft and safety of passengers.
At the same time, air traffic volume continues to increase, making it crucial to explore innovations that improve the efficiency of aircraft and can help flying ontarones without relying on innovations in fuel. Passive developments can not only help with this, but would also do this without being dependent on complex electronic systems.
Nevertheless, the path is to take such technology commercially challenging and this has been the case for many other animal-inspired technologies. In the 1980s, for example, scientists discovered that sharks have small protrusions called Riblets, which cover their bodies, which reduce resistance as they glide through water. They wondered whether applying a similar design on aircraft could considerably reduce fuel consumption. In 1997, researchers quantified that the Riblets in shark skin -like style could reduce the resistance on aircraft by almost 10 percent. However, commercial tests on real aircraft only started in 2016.
Lufthansa Technik, a German space company, eventually developed Aeroshark, an aircraft space technology inspired by the shark skin. “Today, 25 aircraft in seven airlines have been adjusted with our Sharkskin technology, and the number is growing steadily,” says Lea Klinge, spokesperson for Lufthansa Technik. She adds that such innovations require decades of research and that integrating new solutions in existing fleets without disturbing the activities remains a major challenge.
When you consider how you can scale these flaps inspired by spring, “there are some logistical challenges in terms of what kind of materials we can make that flaps or how we can attach them well to the wings,” says Wissa. And rolling out such innovation would not be as easy as adding the plastic film to the small prototype plane in the team's experiment. “Often integrating innovative solutions on commercial level can quickly become complex and multidisciplinary,” says Ruxandra Botez, a space engineer at the University of Ets Montreal. An aircraft must go through various safety tests and certifications, which can easily last several years. Botez also notes that most modern aircraft were built with incremental improvements on earlier models, where manufacturers are reluctant to wander far from existing designs.
However, Lentink argues that focusing exclusively on commercial scalability is the wrong approach. He adds that if innovations with clear scalability are the only ones being tested, researchers will not think outside the frameworks. “If you really want to innovate in space travel, you have to come up with these completely wild ideas,” he says. Too close to the final application, the ability of engineers is limited to make new things. He believes that the secret-spring-inspired flaps, in their current form, are probably not close to immediate application. “But I don't see it as criticism,” he says. “I see it as researchers who develop critical ideas that can now be further developed in this technological pipeline for an application.”
The scientists Wired spoke to the stress that the future of aircraft design must continue to get inspiration from nature. Birds are more agile, capable and maneuverable than everything people have built. “If we want to make planes that can fly so efficiently and adjustment in unpredictable circumstances, we inevitably include aspects of a nutshell in the next generation designs,” says Sedky.
Even if they do not come to large commercial aircraft, Wissa says that these innovations inspired by Veer can be game-changing for small aircraft, which are expected to play an important role in the future of aviation, such as with the provision of package or urban air mobility, several startups that, for example, try to develop flying taxi services. Such aircraft should probably take off and land in tight spaces. These innovations can increase lift and control during such high corner maneuvers.
“As planes become smaller, they also become more sensitive to environmental factors such as windfalls, strong winds and turbulent air flows,” Wissa explains. Equipped with these flaps, small flying vehicles of the future may be able to deal with “windfalls that an airplane would have thrown out of the sky.”
