If you've ever sat in the window seat above the wing of a modern passenger plane, you've probably glanced out and seen the little folds at the end of the plane's wings. These little vertical winglets—like what you might see on either end of the spoiler for a racecar—aren't just some sort of design flourish. They actually help improve the efficiency of the wing, and the whole plane.
As Real Engineering explains in this tight little video on the subject, airplane wings create lift by creating pockets of high pressure air under their wings, with lower pressure above. That's all well and good across most of the wing, but at the tips, the high pressure air wants to zip around the wing's tip to get to the low pressure part—much in the same way pressure differences cause winds on the ground. When the air tries to shortcut like this, it creates a vortex which increases drag on the whole plane, but those winglets help to mitigate that, if not stop it entirely.
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