Vortex Generators

By attaching tiny pieces of specially cut aluminum to an airfoil in a particular order, an aircraft owner can dramatically improve that aircraft’s low-speed handling qualities, including stall behavior, and at a relatively inexpensive price.

- Rob Mark

If this sounds too good to be true, it’s not, as anyone who has installed a vortex-generator kit on their aircraft will readily attest.

Vortex generators alter the flow of relative wind across the surface of an airfoil. A kit consisting of dozens of bits of extruded aluminum, each approximately 2 to 3 inches in length and half an inch tall on a small single-engine aircraft, are attached at an angle to each other along the width of a wing, and sometimes to the vertical stabilizer and beneath the horizontal stabilizer. Each individual piece of aluminum creates a vortex-generator blade and is placed at roughly a 30-degree angle left and right to that same relative wind. The result is the vortex generators form prominent V shapes when viewed from the front of the wing.