Thanks to Linode Cloud Computing, for  supporting this episode of SciShow.

Head to linode.com/scishow to learn  more and get a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. [♪ INTRO]   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!? This video is supported by Linode Cloud Computing.

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