Would dimples on planes make them more aerodynamic?

Dave Ansel had a go at answering Kevin's question... Dave - That's a really, really interesting question. So golf balls have dimples because if you had a perfectly smooth golf ball and you hit it really hard, what happens is you get really big swirls of air coming off the back of it, the air gets round the first half of the ball it detaches and you get these big swirls out the back of it and that causes a lot of drag. Now if you have the dimples and what it does is it creates small swirls, which actually tend to mean the air detaches from the ball later, and that means that you get less drag overall so the ball goes faster and further. Now, planes normally are in a very different regime. They've carefully designed their wings so you don't get very much turbulence off the top and, in fact, when you do get this kind of turbulence it's the detachment of the air flow (it's called a stall), that's normally something which you want to try and avoid and so mostly when you're flying dimples would just give you a bit more drag and make it worse. However, if you're about to stall, having dimples can be useful and, in fact, planes do have things like dimples (called vortex generators) and these are little fins attached to the front of the wing and they can delay the stall a bit so that the planes can fly slower, and land slower, and land on shorter airfields, and things like this. But most of the time you don't need them and all planes have them.