the.com/winglet
The wingtip's little upward flourish that quietly bullies drag into submission.
means A small, often upturned extension at the tip of an aircraft wing that reduces drag and improves fuel efficiency by weakening wingtip vortices.
from Simply 'wing' plus the diminutive suffix '-let' (the same one in 'booklet' or 'droplet'), coined in the 20th century by aeronautics engineers who needed a plain word for a small structural addition — no myth here, just an industry inventing the tidy label it needed once the design itself took off in the 1970s-80s as fuel costs made every bit of drag reduction worth chasing.
- fuel savings
- cuts drag enough to save 3-5 percent fuel
- inventor
- popularized by NASA engineer Richard Whitcomb in the 1970s
- physics trick
- tames wingtip vortices stealing lift as swirling waste
- visual tell
- the upturned tip that makes planes look alert