Comment Re:The Airlines should take notice. (Score 1) 205
The Airlines should take notice.
Judging by the formations of geese and pelicans I've watched flying by in large groups, I have to assume this effect can be carried from one flyer to the next in a chain and isn't confined to just two flyers. The next question would be "Do all trailing flyers receive this 10% fuel savings, or is there some sort of diminishing return at play?"
They all get it, because what they're doing is sitting on the upwash of the air curling off the tip of the wing ahead of them, and that doesn't change. (Well, it's a tiny bit smaller for the second plane than the first, because the second plane is sitting on the upwash from the first one, but any subsequent planes will have their weight offset by the same amount and have the same resultant upwash.)
One interesting effect of this is that the same upwash is curling off the other wingtip, as well. So you could have two planes surfing on the lead plane's wake, and two planes surfing off each of those planes, and so forth. You run into geometry issues: there's not enough room to fit four planes in line behind the two planes following the leader. However, a single plane in that location might manage to be in the upwash of *both* planes ahead of it.
You could have a diamond/triangle of planes, with the lead plane expending the most energy, all the edge planes expending somewhat less, and all the planes in between spending 2x less.
That entirely disregards the jetwash/propwash problems of flying right behind another plane (which are _significant_ -- when you do a two-minute 360 degree turn and hit the disturbed air from two minutes ago it really jounces you around, and this would be more like the 0.1 second old turbulence) but it's possible in theory.
(Sometimes you'll see geese flying in multiple-armed v's as they're taking advantage of this.)