Submerged air inlets are used for several systems of an aircraft, such as engine, air conditioning, ventilation, and auxiliary turbines. This work intends, through numerical simulations, to study the influence of the use of a vortex generator upon the boundary layer that develops upstream of a submerged air intake, with the aim of decreasing its thickness and, thus, to increase the inlet performance. The flow in a conventional NACA inlet is analyzed numerically and its results are considered as a reference for subsequent comparisons. Then, the vortex generator is designed and assembled to the conventional NACA inlet. A parametric analysis of the influence of the horizontal position, the angle of attack, and the area of the vortex generator on the flow field structure and on the performance parameters of the air inlet is presented. Finally, a support mast of the vortex generator is designed, and simulations are performed for the ensemble NACA inlet with vortex generator and mast for three sideslip angles of the support. The results show that the presence of the vortex generator is responsible for considerable reductions of the boundary layer thickness and, consequently, significant improvements of the performance parameters of the NACA inlet. The improvements, relative to the conventional NACA intake, in terms of ram recovery ratio and mass flow rate, may reach of 58% and 21%, respectively, for the case of the NACA inlet with the freely standing vortex generator. For the case of the NACA inlet with the vortex generator and support, improvements of up to 53%, in terms of ram recovery ratio, and 19%, in terms of mass flow rate ingested by the intake, were obtained. The contribution of the drag induced by the presence of the vortex generator with support on the total drag of the ensemble is smaller than 10%.