The choice of airfoil is of great importance in aircraft design thus, it is very important to discover the characteristics of airfoils with different shapes. According to the voyage equation, the lift-to-drag ratio of an aircraft is very important for enhancing the voyage in terms of keeping the oil costs low (Huang et al., 2012c), and this relates to the environment surrounding the aircraft. Improving the capacity of aircraft is essential work for their designers. With the development of the aviation industry, environmental aircraft with low flight costs have attracted increasing attention worldwide. In modern society, flying by air has become a more and more popular part of people’s lives. The process for exploring an improved airfoil through parameterization to optimization is worth referencing in future work. The pressure contours and lift-to-drag ratio along with the attack angle have been compared with those of the original airfoil, and the results demonstrate the strength of the optimized airfoil. Ultimately, an airfoil with better capacity than the original one is acquired using the multi-island genetic algorithm based nonlinear programming by quadratic Lagrangian optimization method. The numerical result of the flow around the airfoil shows reasonable agreement with the experimental data graphically and quantitatively. The response surface model based on the uniform Latin hypercube sampling method gives an accurate prediction of the lift-to-drag ratio with changes in the design variables. The obtained result shows that the modified class/shape function transformation method produces a better imitation of an airfoil in the nose and tail regions than the original method, and that it will satisfy the tolerance zone of the model in a wind tunnel. Finally, the nonlinear programming by quadratic Lagrangian method is utilized to modify the multi-island genetic algorithm, which has an improved optimization effect than the method used on its own. A polynomial-based response surface model and the uniform Latin hypercube sampling method are employed to decrease computational cost. The computational fluid dynamics method is applied to obtain numerically the aerodynamic parameters of the parameterized airfoil, and the result is proved credible by comparison with available experimental data in the open literature. The class/shape function transformation has been proved to be a good method for airfoil parameterization, and in this paper it is modified to improve imitation accuracy. Based on NACA 0012, an improved airfoil is explored in this paper. An excellent airfoil with a high lift-to-drag ratio may decrease oil consumption and enhance the voyage.