NASA and MIT Are Making Flexible, Morphing Plane Wings for More Efficient Flight

Humans may build aircraft that fly higher and faster than any bird, but they haven't yet matched the elegance of nature's aviators. Now, engineers with NASA and MIT believe they can match that aviary flexibility with a new kind of shape-shifting wing that twists and morphs, rendering today's flaps, ailerons, and winglets obsolete. “One of the things that we’ve been able to show is that this building block approach can actually achieve better strength and stiffness, at very low weights, than any other material that we build with,” says NASA'S Kenny Cheung, one of the leaders of the project. Better yet, when the team put the wings onto a dummy plane body and threw it into the wind tunnel at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, the mock aircraft flashed some terrific aerodynamics. “Ideally you’d want a smooth contour,” says Kevin Weinert, from Nasa’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.