Blended Winglets—One 5 Operator’s Perspective（混合WingletsOne 5运营商的角度）.pdfVIP

Blended Winglets—One Article 5 Operator’s Perspective Brian Gleason Southwest Airlines Introduction While most people might believe that the main reason for installing Aviation Partners Boeing Blended Winglets on the 737NG aircraft is to improve the looks of the airplane (after all, they do look cool), the business decision to modify or install the Blended Winglets by an individual aircraft operator is much more complex. The business case to incorporate winglets is an individual operator decision, with differing variables and hurdles for each potential operator to consider. For that reason, this article will not address the business process that was used to arrive at the decision for installing the winglets, but will instead focus on implementation considerations, the validation process that was used to verify the advertised fuel savings, and the operational benefits that were realized. After many months of careful consideration, Southwest Airlines made the decision to retrofit our 737-700 fleet with the Blended Winglets. We modified 172 aircraft over a 17-month period, and we are now having the winglets installed in production for all new aircraft deliveries. Implementation Considerations Aircraft Performance Adding Blended Winglets to an existing aircraft fleet provides some interesting challenges during the transition period from having no winglets installed to having winglets installed on all of the aircraft. The 737NG aircraft with winglets was flight-tested to establish the new level of performance due to the change in drag characteristics. The performance data for this new performance level is provided by Boeing through the normal Flight Operations Engineering publications and software. This article is presented as part