In their efforts to make wings more efficient, aerospace engineers are looking for inspiration from birds’ wings, borrowing a trick from the most accomplished long-range flyer of them all, the albatross
to a customer in the family bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur Wright was idly twisting a piece of cardboard that had once contained an inner tube, when he came up with an idea. The “semi-rigid” way in which the cardboard could be deformed yet still retain its stiffness might, he considered, provide an answer to a little problem he was working on with his brother Orville: how to design a wing for a heavier-than-air flying machine.
The Wright brothers called their system wing-warping. But it did not last. Within a few years, aviators began adopting a more reliable form of control that fitted hinged ailerons and flaps to the trailing edges of wings, and in 1915 Orville conceded, and followed suit. But, in a slightly different guise, wing-warping is now back. And not only that.
One feature of the eXtra Performance Wing, as it is called, is that instead of having moving surfaces attached to the wing with hinges, mechanical actuators will change the shape of a semi-flexible surface on the trailing edge. These “morphing” surfaces will be multifunctional, meaning that by moving them up or down they can be used either as ailerons or as flaps . Pop-up spoilers that emerge from the top surface of the wing will conversely reduce lift, and help slow the aircraft during landing.
Airbus, though, is giving this idea a new twist, by borrowing a trick from the albatross. During long flights, an albatross locks the elbow joints of its extended wings to make them rigid. Thus fixed, they work much like those of a glider . The bird unlocks its wings and flaps them when it needs to manoeuvre or cope with gusty conditions.
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