What are the advantages of blended winglets?
By reducing drag, Blended Winglets increase fuel efficiency and boost range. Blended Winglets enhance longitudinal and directional stability, thereby providing better handling in turbulence. Adding a winglet to an airplane increases two types of drag – skin friction and interference drag. They only reduce the lift-induced drag – when properly designed. In fact, they can easily increase the total drag.A little bend makes aircraft quieter and more fuel-efficient: winglets—upturned or downturned extensions at the tips of wings—improve an aircraft’s environmental performance by reducing drag and increasing lift.Raked wingtip Like winglets, they increase the effective wing aspect ratio and diminish wingtip vortices, decreasing lift-induced drag. In testing by Boeing and NASA, they reduce drag by as much as 5.