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Modern commercial airliners are one of the great feats of engineering.
Think about it. You and several hundred of your closest friends can travel
halfway around the world in just hours.
Moving that much mass that quickly takes a lot of energy.
And, right now, that means a lot of fuel.
Which obviously isn’t great for the fight against the climate crisis.
But, engineers and scientists are learning more about how to build planes
that use less fuel to get to where they need to go.
And they’re looking to nature for inspiration.
From “sharkskin” coatings to formation flying, it turns out nature’s pretty good
at soaring through the skies, and can help us address our own mistakes.
First, let’s get an idea of the scale of the problem.
The most common commercial aircraft, Boeing’s 737,
burns about a liter of jet fuel every second.
And with something like 40 million flights worldwide every year,
that’s a lot of fossil fuel.
Aviation accounts for about 2.5% of all carbon dioxide emissions,
but, because planes emit their pollution high in the atmosphere,
those emissions have an outsized impact on global warming.
But that also means that even tiny efficiency gains,
like shaving off a little weight or reducing drag, can really add up.
One way to limit the amount of fuel a plane uses
is to encourage the air to slip around it.
Airplane designers, searching for more ways to boost efficiency,
turned to one of nature’s sleekest animals: sharks.
A shark’s skin is made up of tiny overlapping scales.
And in species of shark adapted for fast swimming,
like hammerheads, Makos, and Galapagos sharks,
the scales have tiny grooves that run from the nose of the shark to its tail.
Those channels enable water to run smoothly along its body,
which reduces the amount of drag the shark feels as it swims.
You might think a perfectly smooth surface would be the slipperiest,
but sometimes fluid dynamics can be surprising.
When a fluid rushes past a flat surface, vortices, spinning tubes of water,
form and spin off, taking energy with them.
The sharks’ tiny grooves help prevent those vortices from forming
by channeling the water.
They also push the vortices that do form a bit further from the body.
After looking at the microscopic structure of shark skin, engineers in Germany
developed an artificial version they’re calling AeroSHARK.
It’s a plastic film with tiny grooves called riblets that protrude 50 micrometers
from the surface, about as high as a human hair.
The airline Lufthansa is coating the bottoms of their fleet of ten freight planes
with this sharkskin-inspired material,
and it’s set to improve their overall efficiency by about 1%.
That doesn’t sound like much,
but it adds up to about 3,700 tons of saved fuel every year.
is taking inspiration from geese.
Inspired by the V-shape that migrating birds like geese adopt,
the idea is to capitalize on the disturbance caused by another plane.
As the lead plane flies through the air, it leaves behind vortices,
quite a bit like the water lifting off the shark scales.
Another plane, flying behind and off to the side, can capitalize on the
upward-moving air on the outside of the tube, gaining some free lift.
In a recent test flight from Toulouse, France to Montreal, Canada,
Airbus found that a second plane used 5% less fuel
when following a few kilometers behind another.
The nice thing about this strategy is that it doesn’t need brand new planes
or expensive retrofits: it just needs a change in procedure
and some really good communication.
The idea is for planes headed over an ocean to time their flights
so that they can make the journey together.
With the success of the test flight, Airbus expects to start rolling this out by 2025.
These nature-inspired upgrades are just the latest
in a long line of improvements in aviation efficiency.
Each improvement might be small,
but, together, they have added up to real change.
Since 1970, the average amount of fuel
required to fly a kilometer has dropped by 41%.
As more and more people take to the sky, we need efficiency to keep improving.
These sorts of nature-inspired techniques are leading the way.
So next time you look up, ask yourself:
Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a bird-inspired plane!?
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