Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk

notwrong writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a Qantas engineer has found a way to help small aircraft avoid stalling at low speeds: pumping sound through the wings. He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead (nice choices; Spiderbait apparently works better)."

Comments

Maybe taking this too far?

[MiniMike]

It looks like they're thinking of building planes which rely on this technology:

Mr Salmon said that if they could make small aircraft perform better at low speed, it should be possible to build planes with smaller wings, which would be lighter, less thirsty, and thus cheaper to fly.

I can see the headlines already- "Airplane crashes due to smudged CD"

More seriously, have they done studies comparing the frequency of the sound vs air pressure/density? It's possible that other bands would perform better at altitude- maybe they could finally find an appropriate place to play Wings cd's...

Isn't this just an example of dither?

[kjoonlee]

If added noise makes the flight smoother, isn't this dither?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

Just like birds?

[psoriac]

I may be talking out of my ass here, but don't bird wings do the same thing when their feathers ruffle as air passes over them? Wouldn't this ruffling be the same as the vibration described in the article?

Probably a similar phenomenon

[Jubedgy]

Probably a similar phenomenon to adding air blowers on wings. By blowing air out of the top of the wings and into air flowing over them you can have the flow stay attached on the wing much, much longer. This reduces the cross-sectional area of the turbulence and greatly reduces the induced drag.

I suspect that both methods work by adding kinetic energy to the flow, but IANAAE.

Re:Probably a similar phenomenon

[anubi]

I am very curious if they played white noise instead of music, if the results would have been similar.

Could it be as simple as rerouting engine noise back to perturb or dither the airflow on the wings be sufficient?

Or maybe one would have to tune the spectral content of the noise for the flight condition of the moment?

Interesting observation, but I am not one to wanna make anything more complicated than it needs to be.

Re:Ride of the Valkyries

[dotwaffle]

Actually, when you look at it, the only discernable things that an American actually invented was Condensed Milk, everything else was just commercialised by them. Light bulb, radio, telephone, killing stuff with guns - all foreign inventions that were brought to commercial success in the US...