Airplanes or “Langleys”? Stories From the NACA, the Agency Before NASA

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden (front row, centre) with historians at the opening of the NACA centenary symposium. NASA / Aubrey Gemignani.

Had Charles Walcott had his way, we would not fly in airplanes today but in "Langleys".

The story was told by Tom Crouch, senior curator for aeronautics at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, on March 3 at a two-day symposium at the museum marking the centenary of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Founded on March 3, 1915, the NACA was the main foundation on which NASA was built in 1958.

A name that did not take

Samuel Langley, an early aviation pioneer and Secretary of the Smithsonian, had built a piloted, heavier-than-air "aerodrome", which failed in 1903 shortly before the Wright brothers flew on December 17. When Langley died in 1906, Walcott, one of the NACA's first members, succeeded him at the Smithsonian and did all he could to restore his friend's reputation. Airships were called Zeppelins after the count who pioneered them, so in 1915 Walcott wrote to the American Aeronautical Society proposing that the new flying machine be called a Langley.

Samuel Langley's aerodrome at its unsuccessful 1903 trial. NASA.

It was not to be. In 1916 the NACA formally adopted the word "airplane" in its Technical Report No. 9, which set out official names for the new field. Was Walcott serious? "Only partly tongue in cheek," Crouch thought. Langley's name lives on anyway, in NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, the NACA's first research centre, opened in 1920.

Characters and breakthroughs

Historians at the symposium recalled the NACA's colourful people and inventions: Eastman Jacobs, who worked out wing shapes for smooth, laminar airflow; John Stack, whose measurements of wings at high speed helped give rise to the myth of the "sound barrier"; Virginia Tucker and the other women who worked as human computers; and John Jay Ide, the NACA's man in Europe, who kept watch on German aeronautical research before the Second World War.

Doris Baron, a human computer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, works with tape from the manometers. NACA.

Then there was Jack Reeder, the NACA's first helicopter pilot, who flew 235 types of aircraft, 61 of them helicopters, as well as eight vertical take-off and landing airplanes. Auburn University historian James Hansen, author of First Man, the official biography of Neil Armstrong, said Reeder had "the real right stuff": not a record-chasing daredevil like the pilots of 1930s films, but "a man of science, an engineer working in the cockpit to advance our understanding of flight". When Hansen first interviewed Armstrong, Armstrong told him that Reeder was the best test pilot he ever knew.

NACA research pilot Jack Reeder (third from left) with colleagues in front of a P-47 Thunderbolt at Langley, 1945. NACA.

The NACA's best-known achievements were larger still. Its engine cowling won the prestigious Collier trophy, and the work of its laboratories and wind tunnels helped win the Second World War, built up America's civil aircraft industry, pushed flight past the speed of sound, and laid the foundations for modern air travel and the space age. "We wouldn't be here without the first steps taken by those pioneers of the NACA," Bolden told the symposium.

A research culture

A recurring question was whether the NACA's culture survives in NASA. Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, described researchers given wide freedom to pursue their own ideas: a question was posed, a project organized around it — often with private partners — data gathered and analysed, and results shared as widely as possible in the NACA Technical Reports, a must-read around the world. For anyone interested in aviation, he said, the NACA was the gold standard of employers.

Views of the post-war NACA were more mixed. Some saw its spirit continuing; others described an ageing organization in the 1950s that struggled to attract young talent. NASA chief historian Bill Barry suggested that much of that image came from its secret wartime military work, which left it unable to say who was doing what. In 1948 it hired its first public information officer, Walter Bonney, to make the case that the NACA was needed to defeat communism, and in 1955 President Eisenhower gave it more money. Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957; space became the new high ground of the Cold War, and within a year the NACA had become NASA.

History still to write

The final panel asked what historians should study next. Peter Westwick of the University of Southern California noted that when the NACA began in 1915, people in the countryside still rode horses. Aviation then, like spaceflight later, drew historians like moths to a flame, and the past 40 years of aviation research have been largely ignored. NASA's history office has been filling the gaps with books and annotated bibliographies, most of them free online.

Sources

• NASA, "“Airplanes” or “Langleys” and Other Tales of the NACA"; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs from NASA and the NACA.