Originally Posted by
FlightDetent
The costs of certifying an element protruding into the airflow on a wing are huge, and somebody needs to pay for that. Especially if we both guess most will buy it there needs to be a widely applicable positive ROI somewhere. Going one step deeper, the ROI (and a profit margin on top) had surely been identified before authorizing the development of the gadget in the first place.
I'm not disputing that for a moment. Airbus certainly won't be giving away the mod kits for free, there will have been a bean-counter involved at some stage.