ADL Aerodynamic Drag Reduction System
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ADL’s drag reduction kit is designed to reduce the amount of drag on the aircraft, resulting in reduced fuel burn rate and lower carbon intensity.
A Texas based company called Aero Design Labs, formed in 2017, has received their FAA STC (ST09929AC) for an Aerodynamic Drag Reduction System, known as ADRS-1, for the 737-700/-800/-900.
ADRS-1 comes as a kit of retrofits and includes a revised wing-to-body aft fairing, modified flap track fairing tips, revised aerodynamics around the environmental control system pack ram air exit duct, various new vortex generators and updated wheel-well fairings. Each modification is designed to reduce existing areas of interference and parasite drag.
Some of these modifications, likle the ECS and WW fairings, were addressed by Boeing with the Performance Improvement Package, but many were completely new with ADRS-1.
The kit is made predominantly from composite materials, and weighs 180 lb but only increases weight by 110 lbs after replacement of the original structure. It requires about 150 working hours to install. The kits will be made by Nordam and supplemented by LA Composite.
It has achieved approximately 1.5 - 2.0% lower fuel burn on the Boeing 737-800. Based on an average price of about $3 per gallon, the reduced drag would bring an estimated $12,000 per month in savings and around 40 tons of emission reductions per aircraft per month. With such savings, Aero Design Labs is hoping that ADRS could eventually rival the 737 winglet retrofit programs.
The first ADRS-1 started flying in airline revenue service with Southwest on 10 Mar 2023. Southwest ran a network evaluation of drag reduction kits installed on five of its 737-700 aircraft to measure fuel efficiency. In August 2023 ADL announced that "Over the last several months since the installation and certification of our drag reduction kit on a 737-800 aircraft, we have gathered and studied results from several hundred in-service revenue flights at multiple altitudes, speeds and operating weights to verify the cruise fuel benefit of our kits," said Jeff Martin, ADL President and CEO. "We are delighted to share that we have measured cruise fuel burn reductions of between 1.5 and to 2.0 percent. This is consistent with our computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations with results verified by an independent third party."
All of the information, photographs & schematics from this website and much more is now available in a 374 page printed book or in electronic format.
*** Updated 05 Aug 2023 ***
