"as pressure grows to make airliners more fuel efficient and lessen their impact on the environment, eliminating insect contamination is an area that holds a potentially huge payoff for future designs. Aircraft emit 3 percent of greenhouse gases in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and that share is forecast to grow as the government imposes stricter limits on other sources such as automobiles.
In theory, creating aircraft bodies and wings with mirror-like surfaces that can maintain smooth airflow would produce big gains, said Mark Drela, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in aerodynamics.
“On a jetliner, it’s enormous,” Drela said. “It’s a factor of 10. It’s colossal. It’s like taking your car from 20 miles per gallon to 200.”
When air flows across a typical airliner’s wing, it is turbulent, like tiny crashing waves. If the flow remains smooth, it forms layers of different speeds with minimal drag between them, allowing a marked improvement in efficiency."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/nasa-s-bug-repellent-aims-to-save-airlines-millions-in-fuel-cost?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
Also - a solid example of the kinds of impacts that federal research can have. A lot of these materials were probably developed for space projects, or even as basic research in material science. But it has so many potential areas to inform.
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