In the present paper, three types of the flow solvers were used to investigate the influence on the airfoil shape optimization. The adopted equations, i.e., Euler, thin layer Navier-Stokes and full Navier-Stokes ones. are solved using implicit LU-ADI decomposition scheme. The gradient projection method with the sinusoidal function was used as an optimization algorithm. The present numerical method was applied to the drag minimization problems under the initial shape of NACA0012 airfoils.