America's Wings (1980s)

[Music] [Music] hello I'm Jim Burnett and today's show is America's wings the second program of our series on NASA and Aeronautics in this episode we examine some of the ideas which led to the development of the airplane we also take the time to look briefly at some of the unsung pioneers who made important contributions to the world of aviation 1903 at Kitty Hawk North Carolina Orville and Wilbur Wright for the first time put into powered flight a heavier-than-air machine and called it an airplane it turned out to be one of those giant leaps for mankind recorded in the history books of every grade school in the United States and the names of the Wright brothers are known by every fifth grader who passed history that was in 1903 and anyone born in 1903 knows that that's a short time ago but during that short time the airplane has come a long way and it took an awful lot of leaps to get from there to here maybe not so giant as that first one but giant nevertheless and each of the leaps that was taken was first taken in somebody's mine I was sitting in with my feet up on the desk god I'm balling over just what the demo I had and I remember I had the idea and I was rushing into my boss and I said hey look at this I do my best thinking about three o'clock in the morning I have a notebook by the side of the bed I write a noun so don't forget it by the time the falls in Seattle could get around to telling the people who had the airplane and not tested they had already tested it that worked their names may not get included in the fifth grade history books but now that our nation is in its third century it seems fitting that a few unsung people should get themselves some [Music] gravity is pulling us down gravity is great gravity is a downer flying is up flying is a high flying is a release from gravity playing is the ultimate leap for joy flying is freedom flying is wing let's look at just a few of the things that had to happen and a few of the people who thought oh I always was interested in how airplane wing shapes were devised why they came from what considerations made people choose the shape say they chose I had a chance to talk Darvill right about that when I knew him and Orville Wright considered it a practical matter of wind tunnel experiment Eastman Jacobs was in charge of the wind tunnel experiments at Langley field in Virginia during the 30s he worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics the NACA predecessor of NASA Eastman Jacobs worked on wings a wing can lift an airplane just by moving through the air so that's the first order of business to get the plane moving but that's the story of engines first the piston engines turning propellers and then the jet engine if this film were about engines we'd be talking about the problems the engine designers had to overcome to make engines more power but it's about wings and he's from Jacobs job was to make those wings as efficient as possible so that they could lift heavier airplane and so that the engines could move the plane through the air faster and cheaper and that meant reducing the wings drag drag is one of those rare technical words that also happens to be very descriptive drag is a real drag it's the resistance the air sets up against the moving plane it's the force pushing your hand back when you put it out the window of a fast moving car or pushing against that parachute to stop the plane so wing designers have always had their work cut out for them to maintain the lift and decrease the drag one of the first steps was to get rid of all those wires on the early planes and place them with struts the drag went down because there were fewer struts and the struts themselves could be streamlined the next big step once we learned enough about wing structures to make wings light and still strong was to get rid of the struts and then the job was to reduce the drag in the wings themselves then when I joined the research staff at Langley field of that what was then National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics I was put in charge of variable density Tunnel and and I saw an opportunity to do some really important investigating of the effects of various wing shapes on their performance you could replace a wing by a thickness distribution and a curvature and the rule ring was a combination of those two things and we devised a system that we gave NACA numbers to represent variations of these of these variables so many of the airplanes in this country used those wings that were developed as part of these numbered series some of this work was pretty routine and it it supported basic theories that were evolved along about the same time and it was the working together of theory and an experiment that that intrigued me and the fact that we might make contributions to better airplanes he puts it modestly the airfoil shapes that came out of Jacobs work in the 1930s and early 40s are used in the wings of the commercial airplanes flying today the airfoil by the way is the cross-sectional shape of the wing what was happening was that aerodynamicists were busy solving wing problems and engineman were busy making more problems for them they kept improving engine so that planes could fly faster but as a plane flies faster the drag gets higher so the aerodynamicists had to keep redesigning the airfoil the work went on and the planes flew faster and faster and then you get up to near Mach 1 the speed of sound and suddenly there's a whole bunch of new problems shockwaves this is an airfoil the cross-section of a wing in a wind tunnel test the shockwaves of those curved black lines wiggling around near the top of the wing as you watch the plane's airspeed is being increased to just under Mach 1 but the air has to speed up even more to get around the upper curve on the wing that's what lowers the air pressure above the wing and makes the plane go up and the speeded up air actually reaches Bop 1 as it passes above the wing even though the speed of the plane is lower when that happens the plane is flying at the critical speed and when that occurs we get a shock wave standing here on the surface of the wing then that shock wave causes separation of the flow right near the surface which we call the boundary layer and separated boundary layers are very much like the wake behind a boat all churned up and unsteady three things happen the drag goes up abruptly the airplane starts to shake and the airplane becomes uncontrollable and so our planes have been designed not to fly at super critical speeds Richard Whitcomb is also a Langley Research Center man he is presently ahead of transonic aerodynamics at the NASA installation one of his major contributions to modern aircraft design is the supercritical wing now with a supercritical airfoil we flattened off the upper surface we don't speed the air up nearly as much and because of that we greatly delay the onset of the shockwave and the separation and therefore can fly up into the supercritical range I might mention that the we have to get lift what planes can't fly with that lift and we've taken away the the device or the shape that gave lift to conventional airfoil we've got rid of the curvature here now we get the lift back by a very large amount of curvature back at the trailing edge Richard Whitcomb supercritical wing was developed in 1965 but let's go back to 1935 a young German professor named Adolf pasamonte who is surprised to get an invitation to present a paper at an international technical meeting in Rome surprised honored and scared because some of the biggest names in aerodynamics were going to be there this is dr busan our professor emeritus at the University of Colorado and for 16 years a NASA research scientist at Langley I immediately have to to give my letters to the government to see that I am invited in Aston but I get permission but on the other hand of course you had to prepare you talk to otherwise you have a failure and when you see all the other people who are invited and they are famous people and you are a young man you really have to work hard not to make it a flop he worked hard not to make it a flop and came up with an idea for a paper the idea was the swept-wing the angled back wing that we see today on practically every jet in the air hit when I got it and therefore it is really like a almost like that you get the right idea but of course you have to prepare for that it doesn't come out of the dark you have to really prepare yourself and get all your experience together in interesting proper chrétien part of the experience he got together went right back to childhood but of course I was born in a china Harbor town where we had my father was a harbor engineer where we had ships and I could see the power officer ships and they are of course of materia to understand and therefore my haven't seen enough bow waves especially in river boats where the wave pattern is more similar to the one of sound in the ocean the waves are complicated of every wavelength as the special velocity within the river boat or in shallow water you have a similar thing but of course in two dimensions only not in three dimension and when you think of a boat on you have sea or power wave of the boat going sideways you can get crazy ideas what to do with that wave just like people and a Davos man crazy idea was to use that swept back way to take advantage of all that energy and line up his wings in that direction it was all theory at the time it couldn't be tested because they still didn't know how to make airplanes go fast enough but it was an idea whose time finally came [Music] yes I feel I'm the father of the sweet bacon my children are nice now let's go to 1946 when the Boeing Company in the person of George shirer currently vice president in charge of research decided to build a swept wing airplane the plane was the b-47 and the first model had a problem with pitch up the nose of the plane wanted to rise the voice you are about to hear is mr. schirra when we float we found we had this problem we had to do something about it so then we'd searched high and low for schemes to solve the problem eventually one of the fellows who was not working on the airplane but was working another group in the company came to the fellas and said he he knew a solution to the problem that he'd got from some Windtunnel studies some people were doing on things called vortex generators and these had only been studying these vortex generators been studying the wind tunnels to improve the characteristics of wind tiles but nobody ever put him on an airplane so I he was quite outspoken that we ought to try these out and he became nobody would believe him or listen to anybody he was a very bright guy and he became very obnoxious and insisting that we try these so fellow sight all right they would try them and they made up a set of them to put on the airplane and try and at the last minute they decided no they wouldn't test them they would shut it off so the airplane was some far part of the country I believe was down here or in Wichita for testing and by the time the falls in Seattle could get around to telling the people who had the airplane and not tested they had already tested it that worked so that went to a lot of other things the next thing we discovered was that we could make the root part of the wing much thicker without losing much on eye speed and saved a lot of weight saved the pitch off problem and gave us a place to put a lot more fuel inside the wing it also gave us a place to put the landing gear inside the wing and that was the basis on which we were able to then go back in the commercial airplanes and use landing gears mounted on the wings it all stemmed went back to this incident with a pitch up and the vortex generators that very insistent engineer was James Osbourne of the Boeing Company when airplane got to where they could fly fast enough to cross over from subsonic to supersonic speed the drag problems became enormous well in 1952 Richard Whitcomb got a sudden flash I was sitting in with my feet up on the desk mulling over just what the demo I had and I remember I had the idea I went rushing into my boss and I said hey look at this what it was was the area rule the rule did led to the so called coke-bottle fuselage using the area rule the fuselage the body of the plane is next in at the wing let's let dr. Whitcomb tell it I was at a lecture given by dr. Bushman in which he was describing his interpretation of transonic flow and he made the comment that transonic flow was like a pipe fitters flow in that the at the speed of sound or near the speed of sound the tubes of air or the a given amount of air going past an airplane does not contract as it does at subsonic speech what stains with the same cross-sectional area and so it was like a pipe fitters flow in the sense that if you could they see air there would be individual pipes of air going around the wing that weren't changing their shape so I said maybe back I can I can use that and so I was sitting at my desk trying to put together what I had learned in the wind tunnel using the shortened pictures and what dr. boost might had said and then it was like a light bulb lighting up as you've seen in the comic pages aha that is what it is the pipe of air that was has to get around the wing it can't it can't change its shape it can't get smaller to get around the wing it it's a constant area therefore it has to bend around that wing now where can it go it gets probably in general gets pushed there play let's have it come out this way it gets pushed out this way and therefore it continually is pushing more and more pipes are here one of these pipes can change shape or cross-section therefore any pipe that gets pushed out this way the piece of pipe right next to it gets pushed out too and so you go way out here and these pieces of pipe are all being pushed so what we do is to essentially neck down the fuselage in this region make it narrower here so that we account for the cross-sectional areas of the wing in other words we subtract out of the fuselage the area of the wing now with the indented fuselage that pipe doesn't have to go out this way it can bend into the hole in the fuselage and it doesn't affect these pipes out here and this cuts the drag at transonic speeds and a half approximately and that concept was then used to design all the future transonic and supersonic airplanes it's because of wings that an airplane goes up but it's the whole airplane that's flying up there and there's a designer who's got to be included in a film like this one who has advanced the art by designing the whole new airplane some 40 of them during his long career at Lockheed that includes the world war 2 Hudson bomber which he redesigned the Lockheed Lightning the f-104 the first Air Force jet the p80 the u2 and another one that we'll get to in a moment his name is Clarence L Johnson but everyone knows him is Kelly Johnson we talked to Kelly Johnson about the plane that flies at three times the speed of sound the plane that flew from New York to London a few years ago in less than two hours nicknamed black bird and variously identified as the yf-12 and the sr-71 well let's talk black birds in general they're all blue they're not black they become black about to paint Changez we thought we knew all about titanium and we needed titanium to fly either titanium or stainless steel the d70 went the stainless steel route and went the honeycomb route I didn't think we were smart enough to do that so we went the titanium room we thought we knew all about titanium we had researched it for 10 years rather the first 6,000 titanium pieces we made 99% were scrapped they were so brittle you've pushed him off the table in the chat so he said well we'd better start over again we had to princeton invent a hydraulic oil that would stand and operating temperatures 600 degrees fahrenheit it came about that we had to invent almost everything on the airplane I posted a fifty dollar reward to anybody that come up with anything easy to do on the Blackbird I still got the $50 we had help on the metallurgy Chris from titanium Corporation of America but in adapting it to practice we had to do that we had to set up a machine shop and determine the best drill and milling cutters all the rest of it we actually in that program ended up with 67 vendors making us individual machine parts and so we had to pass on to them so optimum tools and other our operating temperatures the average for the whole airplane when we were cruising is about 600 degrees Fahrenheit the strip between the windshield pieces right from the pilot face is running 750 degrees and the bottom of the rudder which is above the afterburner is running 900 to 1,200 degrees and the problem of handling those temperatures the inlet temperature to Z that before the air going into the engine gets over 800 degrees Fahrenheit that's what I say we had invented everything well I do my best thinking about three o'clock in the morning I have a notebook by the side of the bed I write a noun so don't forget it start at seven o'clock and quit at four if you can't do it to the brain she can't do it with hours I don't try to impress my metabolism though on the others if they want to come in at 9:00 and go home 6s up then Kelly Johnson's black birds were flying at Mach 3 15 years ago and for the past 15 years that seems to have satisfied just about everyone as being fast enough now we're looking at new problems and one of the biggest is economic well the airlines of course are in deep trouble because of the cost of their fuel has gone up two three four times in several years so they're very anxious to do something about this so then the question comes alright can we design a different engine can we design a different wing can we design a different cabin to put the passengers in that would save fuel and all of these things are being very seriously considered now most of them are things which require a brand new airplane to make much progress on and there haven't been any new airplanes designed in recent years you can see that this is an add-on type of thing that you could put on to the existing airplanes and thus save fuel for the entire operating fleet of transports military and commercial doctor Wickham's idea is the winglet I'll at the tip of the wing we have a more negative pressure on the upper surface because we have lift and a more positive pressure on the lower surface and therefore the air tends to move inward into that low-pressure region on the upper surface and finally because of that motion downstream of the aeroplane we have a vortex this at this point this thing is trying to start a vortex what Tex is just like a tornado there is a drag associated with that vortex the vortex is an energy loss which must have a drag associated with it and are our devices to reduce the strength of that vortex and therefore reduce the drag the way I like to describe how the drag reduction occurs is that these little winglets are operating just like a sailboat tacking upwind we asked dr. Whitcomb what he expected from the winglet if all goes well the the first step in fact the reason for developing these was to develop something that could be used on existing airplanes and you can see that this is an add-on type of thing that you could put on to the existing airplanes and thus save fuel for the entire operating fleet of transports military and commercial this is where I think it will first be used but on the other hand my calculations indicate anyway it will be on every airplane in the future because it is so much more efficient than an airplane without it there have been a lot of people who have been responsible for the evolution of the airplane we've talked about only a few up but before we conclude let's take time to listen to the late Igor Sikorsky the inventor of the helicopter this is from an interview filmed in 1967 well certainly the question of a teamwork enter is now to a greater extent than is entered before and this is both in science and perhaps in every order branch of technique nevertheless I am convinced that the work of the individuals still remains a very important factor still remains a spark which moves mint kinda had even more than teamwork teamwork comes into existence after the spark the intuitive spark of a living man started something then later comes the teamwork to give a bigger body to the little soul wishing so briefly to my mind creative work is still there with us still there to stay and still remain a tremendously important factor in the progress of mankind we've seen how some of our aeronautical pioneers were motivated and how their ideas changed the shape of aviation next week our story takes us to the 60s the decade in which NASA's aeronautical program start to bloom till then I'm Jim brunette [Music]