Fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are huge priorities in the aviation industry. Take the Boeing 747, which guzzles somewhere around a gallon of jet fuel per second - it's clear that even a small improvement in fuel consumption can make a huge difference to costs at the end of a long-haul flight. In fact, 6% improvement would be about 600,000 gallons of fuel per year, per 747 aircraft.

The Minix device sits at the tip of an aircraft's wing as a replacement to the vertical or tilted winglets now common on many craft. Its primary purpose is to smooth out and negate the high-pressure spiral vortices that form when a plane is in motion as the high-speed airflow struggles to deal with the complex pressure differences in the area where the wing terminates.

These vortices not only create a significant amount of drag on the aircraft, they create a turbulent and occasionally dangerous pressure wake that can interfere with other planes that pass through the same airspace.

The Minix wing tip can be retrofitted to any aircraft wing and the developer claims that prototype testing has shown a 6% gain in drag efficiency at Mach 0.8 - the typical speed of an airliner.