An aircraft stays in the air because of “lift” – there’s a higher pressure on the bottom of the wing than there is on the top. This “upwards” force is generated as the aircraft moves forward and is enough to take flight.
This difference in pressure though also causes what’s called a vortex at the tips of the wings – the high pressure “wraps” it’s way around the tip and onto the top of the wing. This wrap creates the “vortex”, which sometimes you can see trailing behind the wings.
The vortex can also disrupt the lift near the end part of the wing, creating losses in efficiency.
Since around 1900, some people started to change the end of the wings. Wing end-plates, winglets and wing-tips (a bunch of different versions of a similar concept) were created to “recover” some of the losses caused by the vortex.
As the air wraps “around” the tip of the wing, it now has to go up the wing-tip. So the final vortex is now “away” from the wing itself, we reduce the losses and we have more “lift.”
But it takes extra thought, effort and material to build wing tips. There’s a cost. Some planes don’t even have them.
However, it’s been shown that at times, we can get 3-4% more efficiency in long-haul flights with these wing-tips on. When we look at that over the life-span of the plane, there’s a lot of fuel (and money) saved.
Sometimes, in a long project or journey, in the complexity of life, if we are trying to get something done as individuals we too can add systems, or tools. Ways of increasing efficiency, or blocking losses, such as distraction.
Time blocking, tools for limiting blue-light exposure, scheduling apps, more devices and updates. These could all be helpful to reduce energetic losses in the right context.
A lot of the time though, when we really break it down, it seems to serve us to operate lean, to keep things minimal. To notice perhaps where we could reduce, before we go to add.
So, like with the planes, we need to be mindful that when we do add, we aren’t just bolting on wing-tips for the sake of a wing-tip. There’s a cost associated with adding – so if it’s not measurably helping, it’s probably just an expensive way of adding drag.
