Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation is backing a Sydney start-up that makes sharkskin stickers that reduce wind drag and could save the aviation industry tens of billions of dollars a year in fuel costs.

The start-up, MicroTau, has developed a way to print microscopic, three-dimensional “riblets” onto huge, lightweight stickers that can be applied to the skin of an aeroplane to reduce wind drag by as much as 12 per cent, leading to a similar saving in jet fuel.