Why Do Airplanes Have This?

The more you know about something, the better you can make it. This is true with a lot of things but it's perhaps most apparent in air travel. From the days when flight seemed impossible, to trying to fly by making wings and flapping them, to gliding a few meters, to being able to fly. The more we learned about the subject, the more we progressed, and this hasn't stopped. Modern aircraft are nothing if not an amalgamation of countless inventions born from the knowledge we've accumulated and these wingtips at the end of an aircraft wings are one of them.

There are actually many different types of wingtips: Raked Wingtip- where the tip sweeps back at a greater angle than the wing. Wing-tip fence- this tip extends both above and below the wing. Canted Wingtips-this tip is small and looks like the wing has been turned up at the end. Blended winglet- this wingtip curves smoothly from the wing. Split-tip- this is a combination of a fence, raked and blended winglet. All of these tips, although different, have the same basic job and they all stem from a concept that dates back to 1897.

The wing of an aircraft works on the principal of making the air above the wing travel faster than the air below the wing, this creates a lower pressure over the wing which lifts the wing upwards. Now, this all works well until we get to the wingtip, the high-pressure air beneath the wing pushes into the area of low pressure above the wingtip and creates a vortex, which in turn creates "Drag" on the wing. In 1892 English engineer Frederick Lanchester studied the flight of Herring gulls and how they were able to use motionless wings to catch up-currents in the air, from this study he formulated his Circulation Theory of flight which is the basis of aerodynamics and modern aerofoil theory. He even patented Wing end plates as a form of controlling wingtip vortexes in 1897. In 1910 Scottish Engineer William Somerville patented the first functional winglets. But it wasn't until the energy crisis in the 1970s and Richard Whitcomb's research that wingtips began to appear on commercial aircraft. Whitcomb discovered that depending on the size and shape and angle of the winglet, the wingtip vortex be either reduced, moved away from the wing to reduce drag, or moved to strike the wingtip to create additional thrust. What all these had in common though was greater fuel economy and reduced wake vortices, meaning that the air behind the aircraft is least disrupted and thus poses less of a hazard to other aircraft.

Modern aircraft are now opting for the blended wingtip, this is because in addition to additional thrust, better fuel economy, and reduced wake vortices, they allow for a steeper angle of attack which reduces takeoff distance.

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