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Aircraft paint suppliers explore sharkskin coating

The rough skin of sharks has long been known for the low friction of its myriad tiny, sharp-edged scales. Airbus tested aircraft in the 1990s which were partially covered with a foil that mimicked the animals' surface texture. But despite the promise of aerodynamic improvement, the technology has yet to pass the experimental stage.

Lack of durability has been one problem. Another is the fact that while a sharkskin texture can be applied to aircraft or ships, the underlying physics of surface drag is extremely complicated; if nothing else, a shark is far more slippery than a similarly-textured aircraft if only because it is subtly flexible.

However, evolution in paint technology has combined with rising fuel prices to revive interest in transferring the shark's slippery surface texture to aircraft.

Lufthansa Technik (LHT) is testing aircraft paint with a similarly grooved surface in a joint project under Europe's Clean Sky initiative, together with Airbus, Germany's Fraunhofer research institute and Hamburg-based coating manufacturer Mankiewicz