A team of engineers from NASA and MIT has built and experimented with a new type of airplane wing that is unconventional. Instead of thick and strong wings, the team has created a flexible wing that alters as it flies. Measuring 4 meters wide, the new wing is built from thousands of tiny identical pieces. According to Nick Cramer, the NASA research engineer, the wing can alter the shape to control the plane’s flight and works similar to a bird’s wing.

“Something like a condor will lock its joints in while it is cruising, and then it (adjusts) its wing to a more optimal shape for its cruising, and then when it wants to do a more aggressive maneuver, it will unlock its shoulder. That is a similar response to what we are doing here,” he said in a phone interview.

For trial purposes, the initial wing was hand-assembled by students; however, it is expected that the future versions could be constructed by small, simple, autonomous assembly robots. Each piece is made using injection molding and an elaborate 3D mold.

It is not only the way the new wing functions that makes it off the wall, according to researchers who authored a paper published this week in the journal “Smart Materials and Structures.”

The team, including experts from MIT and NASA , say their design could lead to momentous efficiencies in the future manufacture and maintenance of planes.

A research scientist from the NASA Ames Research Center, Kenneth Cheung, gives the example of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which is made from body parts that are so large that they require outsize molds and ovens to create them before they are transported on even bigger planes to the point of assembly. The same applies to the Airbus A380.

“The cost scaling and the amount of infrastructure that the business needs to invest in implementing these new designs is pretty extraordinary,” Cheung told CNN on the phone. “So what we’re doing with these projects is trying to reduce all of that, so that you can have the same sort of performance in terms of the materials but be able to manufacture it without setting up all the infrastructures that are currently required.”

The new wing is made of both stiff and flexible materials. Comprising of small subassemblies which are bolted together to form an open, lightweight lattice framework, are then covered with a very thin layer of similar polymer material as the framework.

It is energy efficient as it is much lighter than the typical aircraft. It is engineered in a manner that the research team describes it as a plane made of ‘thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts’ which results in a framework of mainly empty space.

“Where traditionally you have to have a factory that is bigger than the thing you are making, here the way the all the units come together allows you to tell exactly what shape something is going to be, just based on how many of which components you put together,” Cheung said.

The ultralight modular structure can also be easily packed down to allow transport, which makes it ideal for sending into space.

“All those things go very well with being launched into orbit and being assembled into a very large space structure,” said Cramer. “So that’s a very attractive application that we’re actively investigating — the robotic assembly of these lattice-like structures in space.”

It is incredible how the wing can change its shape in each phase of the flight. The wing would auto-shift its form according to the different aerodynamic loading conditions. The passive self-moving wing is only achieved through the very careful placement of struts with varying amounts of stiffness or flexibility. This allows the wing to bend in specific ways according to its current state. “We can gain efficiency by matching the shape to the loads at different angles of attack,” says Cramer, the paper’s lead author. “We can produce the same behavior you would do actively, but we did it passively.”

So when will these wings be used in the commercial aviation industry? Not anywhere soon. Though the concept of cheaper, more flexible planes could be appealing to the industry, there are significant issues that need to be addressed before they make it to the runway. To begin with, a major concern is to fuse the material into current systems, which may disrupt the standard method of designing planes. This then demands an investment of time, research, and money.

“If you want to justify upheaving the conventional manufacturing process of the aerospace industry, you have to have an excellent reason,” Cramer told CNN. “So your performance gain has to be significant enough to justify that. It is not about whether it is, feasible it’s about whether it is financially marketable.”

As with every new invention, if the technology enters onto commercial aircraft, there will be rearrangement not only in the production but also in the maintenance of planes.

“The more modular one can make a system in terms of the manufacturing, the more likely it is one can get to the point where you can swap out parts so efficiently that you can keep the airplane in service, even through to the point where you have replaced every component on the aircraft. This is something that has been done with boats,” he continued.

“The key thing for this project, we have shown that modularity is right now the best way to achieve the performance in these materials.”

As the technology is growing by leaps and bounds, the wing will definitely enter the commercial aviation industry, but the timing is difficult to predict. For that, we have to wait and watch.