NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
Military Aeronautics By J.R. Wilson
The lab – renamed Langley Research Center with NASA’s formation in 1958, replacing the NACA – was, from the beginning, designed to explore airframe and propulsion engine design and performance to help the United States aviation industry, including its fledgling entry into military aircraft development. From 1917 into the 21st century, just about every U.S. military aircraft went through Langley at some point, either in initial design or to resolve problems encountered in flight-testing and operations. “The NACA basically was formed and the military bought the land the lab was placed on. No other location at the time had the wind tunnels and other research capability located at Langley, which attracted the military,” Joseph Chambers, a retired Langley aeronautics research manager and author of a book on Langley’s contributions to U.S. military aircraft of the 1990s, said. “In its early decades, Langley had a great deal of interaction with the military, especially the Navy, with the NACA headquarters located in the same building and floor as the Navy Department in Washington. That led to a very tight relationship, both with the Navy at Langley and Langley researchers
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going to Navy facilities. In the 1930s, the Army established a liaison office at Langley so they could be closer.” “The nation had invested in unique facilities at Langley and people with expertise operating those. And they gained experience and grew in place while military facilities had constant turnover as military leaders and personnel moved on, taking their knowledge with them,” he said. In pursuit of its goal to “solve the fundamental problems of flight,” state-of-the-art wind tunnels and supporting infrastructure were built to find unique solutions to the rapidly evolving realm of aviation. Those included wing shapes still used in airplane designs today; better propellers; engine cowlings; all-metal airplanes; new kinds of rotorcraft and helicopters; supersonic, transonic and hypersonic flight – all part of the legacy of Langley’s historic aeronautical advances in its first half-century. In later decades, Langley researchers achieved breakthroughs in wind shear and lightning protection, digital control systems, glass cockpits, new kinds of composite materials, supercritical wings, and hybrid wing bodies. Much of its success was
NASA PHOTO
Although the Wright brothers earned the United States credit for the first powered, manned heavier-than-air flight in 1903, when the U.S. entered World War I a decade later, it was far behind the European nations in the development of military aviation. It was a report to that effect that led President Woodrow Wilson to order creation of the nation’s first civilian government facility dedicated to aviation research and development (R&D) – the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory – under the new National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
