This article says ‘848 was modified with research gloves on both wings.’ You can see them in this photo. You can also see one on the outer part of the starboard wing on this T-34C.
What, exactly, is a ‘research glove’? My guess is that there are sensors applied to the wings to gather data, which are covered by a sheet of adhesive material for aerodynamic purposes. But I’m not sure what data they would gather on the wingtip of a Mentor.
I don’t know the exact definition, if there even is one, but they can act as you describe. I’ve heard of them being used to research wing turbulence and laminar flow. I’ve heard of them having plumbing inside for instruments and also having small holes in them so air can be sucked in to disrupt turbulence.
Try searching “aircraft wing glove,” there are some PDFs from studies done with them.
I received a PM with the embedded link to a .pdf file:
So it looks as if my guess was incorrect, and Fubaya is correct. Since the poster sent a PM, and since s/he does not accept PMs, I’ll not identify him or her.
Thank you, Anonymous Sender!
Backing up a bit.
In the context of a production airplane, a “glove” is anything that fits closely over the airplane surface. The pneumatic de-ice boots found on the wing leading edges of some non-turbine airplanes are sometimes called “de-ice gloves.”
In airplane test, a “glove” is a temporary aero shape applied over some part of the underlying structure.
The glove can be as close as possible to the shape & finish of the underlying structure, just providing a thin space to install sensors & leads. Or it can be some different shape or finish, where the whole point is to have different airflow there vs normal. Then you go fly the plane that way and measure the differences between the gloved test area and the normal case.
The funky Styrofoam artificial ice shapes you sometimes see applied to test airplanes are an example of that. e.g. http://www.gulfstream.com/images/uploads/gulfstreamnow_images/g500_72001_t1_ice_shapes_011.jpg
So now we know what gloves are in general.
The linked pdf talks about a research program using calibrated surface roughness to, they hope, improve laminar flow. There have been a lot of projects along these lines flown on a lot of different vehicles & in wind tunnels.
The OP’s original article also mentions laminar flow, but doesn’t specify what they were doing differently to the test surface.
There are also research projects ongoing that involve the opposite of deliberate roughness to help w laminar flow. Efforts at silly smooth surfaces with micro-inch tolerances across large scales and equipped with coatings that in effect repel the air, dust, rain, etc.
Right now our computational science tells us that we can shave 10-20% off the drag of a plane if we can achieve laminar flow across a large area. But our aero science doesn’t know for sure (yet) how to predict how to create & maintain that good flow. And our engineering certainly doesn’t know (yet) how to build it affordably or maintainably.
The insane cost per flight hour required to maintain the radar absorbent coatings on stealth aircraft is a cautionary tale. We fly a single airliner more in a day than the USAF flies a single B2 in two months. If it isn’t cheap to build and durable to operate, it isn’t practical for our use case. No matter how much fuel it might save on paper.
