Sound to keep aircraft up.

Well I think this is really neat. Apparently this isn't new, but it's new to me. It seems that if you have sound blasting through the wings of an aircraft, it helps to keep the air flowing over the wings.

from: smh
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.

Sounds great to me! (I'm sorry, that was really bad )

excellent find man. Amazing what people are coming up with these days. For some reason the article reminded me of the deep bass humming noise sometimes heard at UFO sightings.

Sound waves are basically shock waves. The XB-70's downward canting wingtips made good use of this principal aka Compression lift and the X-21 kind of used flowing air to a similar effect

X-21 Laminar Flow Control
The X-21 program consisted of a pair of WB-66D's modified by Northrop to conduct Laminar Flow Control wing studies. Laminar-flow control is a technology that offers the potential for improvements in aircraft fuel usage, range or endurance that far exceed any known single aeronautical technology. In principle, if 80% of wing is laminar, then overall drag could be reduced by 25%. The frictional force between the air and the aircraft surface, known as viscous drag, is much larger in a turbulent boundary layer than in a laminar one. The principal type of active laminar-flow control is removal of a small amount of the boundary-layer air by suction through porous materials, multiple narrow surface slots, or small perforations.
www.globalsecurity.org...

jra,
That link you provided wants me to register first
Would you mind posting the article for me

Damn now I need to register too, it wasn't like that before. Lame