The Collaborative Research Center SFB 401: Flow Modulation and Fluid-Structure Interaction at Airplane Wings investigates numerically and experimentally fundamental problems of very high capacity aircraft having large elastic wings. This issue summarizes the findings of the 12-year research program at RWTH Aachen University which was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from 1997 through 2008. The research program covered the following three main topics of large transport aircraft: (i) Model flow, wakes, and vortices of airplanes in high-lift-configuration, (ii) Numerical tools for large scale adaptive flow simulation based on multiscale analysis and a parametric mapping concept for grid generation, and (iii) Validated computational design tools based on direct aeroelastic simulation with reduced structural models.