Question: How did you become so interested in designing plane wings?

Olivia Stodieck answered on 16 Mar 2015:

I’m really interested in finding solutions to challenging problems I guess!
The wings of an aircraft need to be as light as possible (because any extra weight on the wings means less passengers or cargo in the plane), while also generating the lift required to make the plane fly without breaking and without too much aerodynamic drag. So it’s a very multi-disciplinary problem and every change to the shape, or size, or material of the wing will affect the performance of the whole aircraft.

Air traffic is predicted to increase almost 5% every year in the next 20 years: so for every 100 people that flew last year, there will be roughly 105 people flying this year, then 163 people in 10 years and 265 in 20 years. So we need to design better airplanes fast, that will burn less fuel, be quieter and pollute less.

On the other hand, I also really like to sail in my free time, and airplane wings are just like horizontal boat sails … so maybe that’s what got me interested in the first place: how to use air to generate useful energy. 🙂
If you think about it, there are lots of other applications that also rely on the interactions between air and a lift-generating body, e.g. helicopter, drones, wind turbines. So this is really interesting, growing topic.