Sharks in the sky? Well, fish and aviation may not feel like the most natural of associations, but the truth is that aerodynamic engineers can learn a lot from these aquatic creatures and how they glide through the water. On Friday, February 3, the first Boeing 777 freighter belonging to Lufthansa Cargo and equipped with AeroSHARK took off from Frankfurt.

The aircraft is registered as D-ALFA and took off as flight LH8410 at 05:07 this morning, heading to Bengaluru, India, where it landed at 17:49 local time after a flight time of 8 hours and 12 minutes.

After two hours on the ground, it is scheduled to continue on to Chengdu, China, arriving in the wee hours of the morning Saturday. Sounds like a pretty regular cargo run from Europe to Asia. So what is different about D-ALFA and this flight?

The airplane had been covered with about 800 m2 of AeroSHARK. This is a barely perceptible surface film that mimics the microscopic structure of shark skin, consisting of ribs around 50 micrometers in size - so-called riblets. These are designed to optimize the airflow, reducing drag and thus contributing to fuel and emissions savings.

Sharkskin film being applied to plane
Photo: Oliver Rösler / Lufthansa Group

Reducing carbon footprint of cargo fleet

Dorothea von Boxberg, Chairwoman of the Executive Board and CEO of Lufthansa Cargo, commented on the milestone

"We are proud to be able to operate our entire freighter fleet even more efficiently in the future thanks to Sharkskin technology and to further reduce the carbon footprint of our modern fleet. Our investments for the introduction of AeroSHARK bring us closer to our goal of being 100 percent CO2-neutral in the air by 2050; on the ground, we would like to achieve this goal as early as 2030.”

Sharkskin film application
Photo: Oliver Rösler / Lufthansa Group

Lufthansa Technik and BASF have developed the material. The companies estimate that it will lead to a fuel saving of a little above 1%. When it's applied to the entire Lufthansa Cargo 777 fleet (which consists of 11 aircraft), it will result in annual savings of more than 4,000 tons of kerosene and nearly 13,000 tons of CO2. This corresponds to 53 individual cargo flights between Frankfurt and Shanghai.

Sharksin on aircraft
Photo: Oliver Rösler / Lufthansa Cargo

Another Lufthansa Group carrier, SWISS, was the first passenger airline to operate with AeroSHARK, when one of its Boeing 777-300ER aircraft took off from Zurich, Switzerland, for Miami, USA, on October 14, 2022.

Technology banned from the Olympics

This is probably not the first time you hear about this airflow optimization technology. But just in case it is, you may have come across it in a different context, although closer to the element from which it draws inspiration. It has also been adopted by elite swimmers to glide faster through the water. During the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, Ian Thorpe, who won three gold medals, wore the first generation of "sharkskin" swimsuits.

Full-body swimsuits inspired by sharkskin were later banned ahead of the London Games in 2012, although some researchers say the advantage they offered was due to covering more of the body compared to classic swimsuits and not because of the surface materials.

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Source: The Independent