That is a technology that has also been flight-tested on some airlliner-sized designs, and has been around for a while (a couple decades?)
Aeroelastic tailoring can be achieved through careful design of the structure (re-optimization of the load paths), by selecting new structural materials (composites behave differently than metals), and by adding flight control system features to "fly" the wing in new ways. There are some definite advantages as well as some fairly dangerous pitfalls.
Aeroelastics can be used for suppression of gust loads, for flutter suppression (to fly to higher speeds, or to fly at the same speed with lighter structure), for spanwise bending relief, and a few others. Generally, none of the published studies have included an honest, realistic assessment of the true benefits of this technology. Key point: if you use these active flight control systems to tailor the wing modes and control unwanted deflections, and then if you also take out part of the wing structure weight to "cash in" on the improved wing, and if you are flying "at speed" and experience ANY failure anywhere in the control system (hydraulic failure, electric power failure, FCS failure, air data system failure, etc) that is non-redundant and instantly online, your aircraft will immediately be at an inflight failure condition...because you took part of the structure out. All it takes is one little blip, hiccup, hangup, etc, and the wing will flutter to destruction.
The full impact of implementing this technology (and reducing wing structural weight) is that all "system level" components must now be designed with full redundancy and instant availability. The cost of this is additional power supplies, additional compute power, additional air data sources, etc, and they must all be operating at full capacity at all times to be ready to step in after a failure. Even then, while in failure mode, the aircraft would only have a single level of operating safety (non-redundant) which is an unacceptable safety feature, even if it only applies to the few moments it would take to slow down to a "safe" flight speed for the structure. When you add up all the costs of installing and operating the additional systems, it is far less expensive to just leave in a few extra pounds of aluminum (or graphite) that you had in the first place.
Put another way; if there was a safe way to implement this technology and achieve any true benefits, don't you think the airlines (who would happily kill you to get a 1% fuel savings) would have jumped all over this by now? A pound of metal costs a few hundred bux by the time it makes it into an airplane, but a pound of electronics costs thousands of dollars. This technology seems to fall into the category of someone's cute little science project, something that the big boys really are not seriously interested in.
(To Clay: The type of wing flexure that is under discussion here is normal, plain old, beam-bending-twisting structural deflection that every wing experiences. The B-52 wingtip bends through some ten feet of vertical deflection, but that wing is still considered to be a "rigid" non-moving structural design.)
