I'm coining this term - corona drag reduction - right now. This is purely hypothetical - I want to know if anyone has heard of a technique like this, and would it work?
The idea is to reduce drag by creating a strong electric field on the outer shell of an aircraft, thereby ionizing the air. Essentially, turning the aircraft into a flying Van der Graff machine, that pumps charge from somewhere inside to the outside surface of the craft. I'm thinking this would ionize the air around the plane via Corona discharge. It would take some power input keep a voltage, but I'm wondering if you could eliminate the velocity-dependency of air resistance by ionizing it.
Has anyone done experiments on this?