Land vehicle platooning improves the overall fuel economy of the fleet by decreasing its total air resistance. In this work, we investigate the drag forces on a five-glider fleet of underwater gliders, both in a conventional �V� and an alternative, more compact, 3D �V� formation. In addition, the effect of transverse, longitudinal and vertical separation of these gliders on the drag forces is studied. Our study uses ANSYS Fluent with Re- Normalization Group (RNG) k-epsilon model with non-equilibrium wall function as the turbulence model. Based on the simulation results, a low drag of 2.7 N, similar that achieved in a �V� formation, can be achieved with the more compact 3D �V� formation, which has a smaller footprint. The lowest drag was achieved at 1.1 m longitudinal and transverse separation with 0.2 m vertical separation for a 1.03 m glider with a 0.28 m diameter and 0.98 m wingspan. © 2017 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.