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 ...

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 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, ...

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 ...

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, ...

It's common to see line-shaped clouds in the sky, known as contrails, trailing behind the engines of a jet airplane. What's not always visible is a vortex coming off of the tip of each wing--like two ...