Radical Wings & Wind Tunnels: Advanced Concepts Tested at NASA Langley
by Joseph R. Chambers and Mark A. Chambers, Specialty Press, North Branch, Minn., 2008, $34.95.
This book covers a 91-year period of remarkable achievements by scientists, engineers and technicians at the Langley Research Center, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility that is all too often overlooked. Laden with rarely seen photos and writ ten in an accessible style, it makes a welcome contribution to aviation literature. In their acknowledgements, the authors note that Langley has contributed to most of the nation’s critical aeronautical achievements and state their mission: to “reveal a sample of these unknown efforts to the world.”
Joseph and Mark Chambers are extremely experienced in their field, but could easily have lost the narrative thread in Langley’s complex history. Instead they wisely concentrate on telling Langley’s story in the terms of radical, unconventional aircraft that did not reach production. The result is an amazing journey from such little-known types as Fred Weick’s perky little W-1A through UAVs that might someday fly over the surface of Mars. Some developments came from surprising sources—for example, the ungainly McDonnell Doodlebug, which contributed to the design of wing-fuselage fillets, or the unheralded Curtiss P-42, which was used to flight-test an all-movable horizontal stabilizer. The book also demonstrates how Langley transitioned from its early National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics days, when the concept of a full-scale wind tunnel was so revolutionary, to the less dramatic but equally revolutionary beginnings of computer-aided design.
Radical Wings & Wind Tunnels explores extremely complex subjects in a way that a layman can easily understand, no simple task when you are dealing with everything from Rogallo wings to hypersonic flight. In an era when virtually everything is being “dumbed down,” Specialty Press deserves congratulations for publishing this book, another in its series of technical books that every aviation library—public or personal—should have.
Originally published in the March 2009 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
