Winglet

I fly American and recently noticed the new wing structure on their Boeing 737s—I believe it’s the 800 series. My first thought, amateur that I am, was that birds don’t have these upward-sweeping appendages, and if anything bird wings tilt down, so I wondered if the winglet is, as a flight attendant explained to me, more aerodynamic than the flat wing we know and love.

Wingtip structures aren’t new—the Wright brothers toyed with them, private jets adopted them thanks mainly to Burt Rutan, some 747s and Airbuses have been wearing them for a while. But now they are moving into US commercial fleets in a big way. Some winglets go up, some down, some are curved (blended), some angle backward (raked), some are splayed. Hmm. Wikipedia says the winglet reduces vortices—by which it means turbulent air—that flow off the wingtips, causing drag on the plane as well as creating potential problems for following aircraft. This last could happen over airports, where planes line up to land. (Lots of engineering and Air Force studies are available online, as well as enthusiastic discussion threads.)

So the winglets improve performance, save fuel, increase safety, and ideally, by allowing planes to fly closer together, could make flights more frequent. I’m not opposed to frequency, in principle, though here the principle is a bit dubious—unless you add gates and runways, more planes in the air only means more waiting, thus defeating the purpose of more frequent flights. No one flying into a major airport wants to arrive early, no matter how cheerily the captain chirps about it over the intercom. Of course I know that the on-time arrival metric is a PR game pilots are ordered to play. I feel for them. I also feel for you and me. We sit on the tarmac. We sigh. We quietly fume. The beverage cart is gone. No more chilled cabernet for you, chump.

But where was I.

It’s a delicate little being, the winglet, and I admire its saucy curve and pert outlook. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, to tell the truth. It’s just one of the 367,000 parts that go into the 737, according to Boeing, but it makes a statement beyond its technical utility. It strikes a romantic note, like a musical flourish, but no less real for that. Perhaps it’s the upward sweep that charms, a symbol of rising, transcending, being airborne, aloft, above, high—and yes, free.

The Air Force Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, strikes that same note rather gloriously. Perched on a grassy knoll at Fort Meyer, just across the river from the District of Columbia, its three curving steel spires rise over the beltway, the Pentagon, the lordly Potomac, and the 14th Street Bridge, over which a certain jet was unable to rise in the winter of 1983.

The silver prongs also ascend over the southwest corner of Arlington National Cemetery, where my father is buried. He is practically underneath them, in section 66, at Eisenhower and Bradley streets. A lot of the old WWII aviators are here, so it’s an appropriate site for the memorial, if not the first choice. (The site originally proposed was a bit too close to the Iwo Jima memorial for the comfort of Marine Corps supporters, notably the late Rep. Gerald B. Solomon of New York. A turf war ensued, an injunction and court case followed, the memorial site was moved.)

In the summer of 2006 I happened to be boarding a flight at National Airport when the pilot announced there would be slight delay, as the new memorial was being dedicated with a flyover for which we had to wait. A passenger in the aisle complained to his companion that this sort of military lovefest was not what he paid his taxes for. I hold the opposite view, of course. I didn’t tell him that the memorial itself was privately funded by the members, veterans, families, and friends of the United States Air Force. As for flyovers, there can’t be too many, in my book. Show me the hardware. Yes, I'll wait.

In any other American metropolis, the monument’s spires would be swallowed up in a cityscape of towering glass boxes. In Washington, where no structure can be taller than the needle-like Washington Monument, the Air Force memorial pops into view frequently on both the Virginia and DC sides of the Potomac. Commercial aircraft fly over it day and night, tipping their wings, and possibly their winglets, as they climb over the river, into the clouds, and above even these.