Catalina36
N/A
I'm grateful for your technical explanation of what I'd understood to be the case. TBH I was a little surprised that the reason was "fitting into terminal gates", given that they fit tabs to aircraft with smaller wingspans than older planes like 747's which don't have them but which still fit the gates. They could just make the wings longer!Hmmm. Catalina's version of this is closer to my understanding of the reason for vertical winglets at the wingtips of modern aircraft.
If I may quote to you from an abstract in an article in the International Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
"The endplate causes a blockage effect on the flow, and an additional viscous effect especially near the endplate. These combined effects of the endplate significantly reduce the magnitudes of the velocities under the lower surface of the wing, thereby enhancing aerodynamic performance in terms of the force coefficients. The maximum lift-to-drag ratio of a wing with an endplate is increased 46% compared to that of wing without an endplate at the lowest clearance. The tip vortex of a wing-with-endplate (WWE) moved laterally to a greater extent than that of a wing-without-endplate (WOE). This causes a decrease in the induced drag, resulting in a reduction in the total drag."