NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
CIVIL AERONAUTICS: 100 Years of Discovery and Innovation at Langley Research Center By Craig Collins
It’s been more than a century since the Wright brothers invented the first successful airplane, and, like many of history’s most celebrated events, their flights at Kitty Hawk have become shrouded in mythology. Orville and Wilbur Wright were humble sons of a Midwestern clergyman, the myth goes, tinkering bicycle mechanics who became fascinated with flight long before anyone else took it seriously. The truth is actually more interesting. The Wrights were among thousands of people trying to solve the problems of powered heavier-thanair flight around the turn of the 20th century. At the time, some of the Western world’s most prestigious institutions were placing bets on the contestants – including the U.S. military, which granted inventor and Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel P. Langley $50,000 for flight research. The Wrights beat all of these competitors for one simple reason: They had better data. The Wrights were brilliant, meticulous engineers. Their earliest flight experiments failed, in part, because they were relying on a lift coefficient – a ratio of air pressure on a wing to the speed of air moving over it – calculated by an 18th-century Englishman. They decided to start from scratch and do their own calculations, building their own wind tunnel and equipping it with instruments that would measure forces operating on model wings. Beginning in the fall of 1901, they tested more than 200 wing designs in their tunnel and came up with new configurations for their flying machines.
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The U.S. government didn’t take much interest in the Wrights’ achievement at first, but World War I made flight research seem much more urgent. Beginning in 1915, Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and set aside 1,650 acres of land in Hampton, Virginia, for an aeronautical research laboratory and airfield. Construction of the first building of what would become known as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, named for the late aeronautics pioneer, was begun in 1917. From the start, Langley’s aeronautical research program focused largely on aerodynamics, and on doing research the Wright way: that is, using the wind tunnel as a primary instrument of study, and validating wind tunnel data in flight tests at adjacent Langley Field. By 1934, the Langley Laboratory had constructed seven wind tunnels, including the massive 30-by-60foot Full-Scale Tunnel, then the world’s largest. In less than two decades, Langley was home to the greatest aeronautical research capability in the world.
