Thread: Corona Drag Reduction?

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?

First question: how do you power it? You're talking about ionizing lots and lots of air, and not only that, but ionizing it so fast that the process completes as the aircraft is passing through the air at (I assume to be) supersonic speeds.

you power it with tremendous amounts of on-board energy. the idea is that if you can eliminate the velocity-dependency of drag, it's worth any energy cost, because you can reach speeds to justify it.