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TODAY, special attention is being paid to low-fuel-consumption and low-emissions air vehicles. This is due to an increasing environmental impact of air vehicles [1] and the need for energy independence. A possible option to tackle these problems is the use of exotic alternative propulsion systems such as all-electric emissionless vehicles [2]. Still, a large effort is being directed toward efficiency improvement of current airliners and the design of new, more efficient air vehicles.

One of the issues influencing the fuel consumption for a given vehicle mass, and thus also its emissions, is the vehicle drag, or liftto-drag ratio. The different components of vehicle drag (eg, induced, friction, profile, interference, and wave drag) are influenced by various aspects of the vehicle configuration. The wing span and the wing efficiency factor strongly influence the induced drag. The wing thickness-to-chord ratio t= c and the wing sweep …