A closer look
Day the airplane wing was redesigned by accident: in the 1960s, engineer Richard Whitcomb noticed turbulence stripes in tunnel smoke behaving oddly around curved metal shapes. His mistake birthed the 'winglet'—the tiny upward flick at a plane’s tip that slashes fuel use by up to 7%. Every jet you board now has them, quietly saving millions of tons of carbon each year. Aviation thrives on invisible genius: a centimeter tweak here, a swirl canceled there. Next time you spot that curled tip out the window, nod to a half-century-old accident humming with aerodynamic poetry.
