Thank you for the quick reply, and forgive my superficialty. Here's he current state of affairs. It looks acceptable, but my approach seems to have its problems (extrusion has its own issues, but more on that later):

Note that a wing profile is supposed to be quite a delicate shape with a rounded, higher-poly leading edge and a sharp trailing edge that can be much easier on the poly density. At the same time, the fuselage is a rather tidy tubular structure. Naturally, the two go together like chocolate and sauerkraut.

So what did I do to achieve the above result, and what is it that I don't like about it? Well, the following is a glimpse at the mesh resolution I've been working in (it started out with two low-res cylinders, one of which ended up as the fuselage, the other one as the wing stub). Note how I mindlessly cut through quads to make it all fit:

This solution just seems to feel untidy and may or may not get me into trouble later. It gets worse once we take a look at the subdivided mesh:

As I mentioned earlier, I think I'll go with this solution for my current purpose, but I feel there must be better ways to achieve the overall shape.

I perfectly see how plain old extrusion is attractive: It gets you tidy edge loops around the wing roots (no messy triangles), but given how nasty a shape a wing actually is, I've never achieved satisfactory results with that. The vertical stabilizer you can see at the tail is extruded, as this one is less demanding in terms of actual airfoil geometry. But a wing will probably get you in trouble if you aim for a certain degree of realism. The manual fiddling to get the profile right (if at all) is probably much worse than with my approach of just bruting two separate cylinder-based meshes together. However, if anybody comes up with a nifty technique for extruding a satisfactory wing from a fuselage, I'll be more than happy to learn!

Now I actually regret I didn't document the process I used to achieve the above results. I have yet to do the horizontal stabilizers (the little wing-ish thingies at the tail that are still missing), which will be pretty much the same procedure. If anybody is interested, I can document the progress with a couple of screenshots to...:

a) show how it's (messily) done in case you're still learning.

b) Point out the problematic issues during the procedure in case you can provide some advice.

Pardon the lengthy post, I hope I could clarify the problem.