Anti-shock body
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Anti-shock bodies, Küchemann carrots, or flap track fairings are pods placed at the trailing edge of a subsonic aircraft's wings in order to reduce wave drag, thus improving fuel economy, as the aircraft enters the transonic flight regime (Mach 0.80–1.2). Most jet airliners have a cruising speed between Mach 0.8 and 0.85. For aircraft operating in the transonic regime, wave drag can be minimized by having a cross-sectional area which changes smoothly along the length of the aircraft. This is known as the area rule, and is the operating principle behind the design of anti-shock bodies. On most jet airliners, the mechanisms for deploying the wing flaps are enclosed in fairings, called "flap track fairings", which also serve as anti-shock bodies.
Anti-shock bodies were concurrently developed by Richard Whitcomb at NASA and Dietrich Küchemann, a German aerodynamicist, in the early 1950's. The Handley-Page Victor bomber was particularly well-known for featuring a conspicuous pair of Küchemann carrots, so-called because of their distinctive shape.
