What are the characteristics of high aspect ratio wings?
If you design a high aspect ratio wing that is going to be efficient at fast cruising at some high altitude, will that wing also be relatively effective during the takeoff, climb, and descent phases of flight done at lower altitudes and at some much lower speed?
For example, a glider has a high aspect ratio and is effective at flying low and slow. A B-52 bomber also has a high aspect ratio and is efficient at flying relatively fast at relatively high altitudes. Since the B-52 is optimized to fly fast only at high altitudes, does it necessarily have good low speed, low altitude performance?
Basically I understand that the tradeoff between a low aspect ratio/ high sweep wing and a high aspect ratio / low sweep wing is in how they incur induced and parasitic drag. Higher aspect ratio is more efficient at countering induced drag which is dominant at lower speeds. Lower aspect ratio reduces parasitic drag which is dominant at higher speeds. I also understand that flying at higher altitudes (in thinner air) "shifts the curve" of induced and parasitic drag so that at some higher altitude at a given speed, induced drag is greater and parasitic drag less, than at the lower altitude at that same speed.
So say you are designed an airplane to cruise high at FL490 (typical of new business jets) and therefore you are giving it relatively high aspect ratio wings to maximize efficiency at that altitude. Does the same wing which maximizes efficiency at very high cruise altitude also give your wing a high lift/drag ratio at the lower and slower speeds typical of the beginning and ending segments of the mission?
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This stems out of my question on why Dassaults have 3 engines. There was no final consensus, but most people argued that 2 engines is in almost every way preferable to 3 and that the main reason that Dassaults have 3 engines is that when they were designed, there were not suitably reliable small turbofan engines for the size of plane that it was building. So Dassault added a third business jet engine to improve redundancy while Gulfstream took the approach of adapting more reliable-but-thirsty commercial airliner engines to the job. And then supposedly the newly designed 7X has 3 engines because of the eccentricities of tradition (or, less likely, because again they didn't like their choice of turbofans in the thrust class that they would have needed to make it a 2 engine plane).
So then the difference in their performance characteristics must be explained elsewhere in the plane. Dassaults have lower runway requirements, competitive climb performance (at least the 7X does), and more fuel efficient cruising. If its not their 3-engine layout giving them this performance, maybe it is the wing. They do have an abnormally high aspect ratio wing which they then cruise at high speeds efficiently on, while having the lowest runway requirements and slowest approaches in their classes.