A momentum balance approach is used to extract the drag from flowfield computations for wings and wing/bodies in subsonic/transonic flight. The drag is decomposed into vorticity, entropy, and enthalpy components which can be related to the established engineering concepts of induced drag, wave and profile drag, and engine power and efficiency. This decomposition of the drag is useful in formulating techniques for accurately evaluating drag using computational fluid dynamics calculations or experimental data. A formulation for reducing the size of the region of the crossflow plane required for calculating the drag is developed using cut-off parameters for viscosity and entropy. This improves the accuracy of the calculations and decreases the computation time required to obtain the drag results. The improved method is applied to a variety of wings, including the M6, W4, and Ml65 wings, Lockheed Wing A, a NACA 0016 wing, and an Elliptic wing. The accuracy of the resulting drag calculations is related to various computational aspects, including grid type (structured or unstructured), grid density, flow regime (subsonic or transonic), boundary conditions, and the level of the governing equations (Euler or Navier-Stokes). The results show that drag prediction to within engineering accuracy is possible using computational fluid dynamics, and that numerical drag optimization of complex aircraft configurations is possible
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