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October 26, 2009
Richard T. Whitcomb Is Dead at 88; Revolutionized the Design of Jet Aircraft
By DENNIS HEVESI
Richard T. Whitcomb, whose understanding of the way air rips around an airplane as it approaches the sound barrier revolutionized the way jets are shaped, allowing them to fly faster on less fuel, died Oct. 13 in Newport News, Va. He was 88 and lived in Hampton, Va.
The cause was pneumonia, his nephew David Whitcomb said.
Testing his ideas in supersonic wind tunnels, Mr. Whitcomb came up with three design changes that solved problems that had confounded his fellow aviation engineers. One enabled combat jets that had been built to break the sound barrier, at about 740 miles an hour, depending on temperature and atmospheric pressure, to actually do so.
Mr. Whitcomb did his work while he was a researcher at the Langley Memorial Aerodynamic Laboratory in Hampton Roads, Va.
The laboratory, now a division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was run by a NASA predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, when Mr. Whitcomb started working there in 1943. He retired in 1980.
“Richard Whitcomb was arguably the most influential aeronautical engineer/researcher of the jet age,” the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum said in a statement.
The museum’s senior curator of aeronautics, Dr. Tom Crouch, said in an interview Wednesday that Mr. Whitcomb’s “intellectual fingerprints are to be found on virtually every major high-speed commercial and military aircraft flying today.”
All three of Mr. Whitcomb’s innovations succeeded in reducing the air drag that slams a jet — much as snow piles up in front of a too-eager snowplow — when it approaches the speed of sound.
His first breakthrough, made in 1951 but kept secret for military security reasons until 1955, is known by several nicknames: the “Coke bottle,” the “Marilyn Monroe” or the “wasp waist” design, because it calls for a sloping indent in the plane’s fuselage where the wings are attached. More scientifically, it is known as the “area rule.”
Dr. Crouch explained that the ideal shape for an aircraft to surpass the speed of sound “is something like a 50-caliber bullet.” But the wings create drag, and the Air Force needed jets that could maneuver, even in dogfights, at the highest possible speeds.
“When they first built the F-102 jet fighter, it was designed as a supersonic interceptor, but they couldn’t get it through the speed of sound,” Dr. Crouch said. “Whitcomb came up with the area rule: If you pull in the fuselage, make it ‘wasp waist’ near the wings, you reduce the drag.”
The new design increased the speed of supersonic warplanes by up to 25 percent without any increase in engine power. A plane capable of 800 miles per hour with the conventional straight-line fuselage jumped to 1,000 m.p.h. when its fuselage was indented.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Whitcomb came up with another breakthrough. The supercritical wing, as it is called, was far less curved on top than the conventional wing — indeed, it was almost flat — and curved on the underside at the rear. It, too, greatly improved operating economies of high-speed planes by enabling them to fly as much as 100 miles per hour faster without any increase in engine power.
The supercritical wing is now part of the design of nearly every commercial airliner and has saved billions of dollars in fuel costs and flying time.
Later in the 1970s, Mr. Whitcomb introduced winglets — small, inclined panels that are attached to the tips of wings and reduce drag. They increase fuel efficiency by as much as 6 percent to 7 percent.
“It’s intuitive,” Mr. Whitcomb once said, according to the National Air and Space Museum statement. “I didn’t run a lot of tests to arrive at an idea, and I didn’t run a lot of mathematical calculations. I’d just sit there and think about what the air was doing, based on flow studies in the wind tunnel.”
His intuitions, he said, first came to him when he was a boy making model planes.
Richard Travis Whitcomb was born in Evanston, Ill., on Feb. 21, 1921, one of three children of Frederick and Gladys Travis Whitcomb. His father, an engineer, had flown balloons in World War I. After the family moved to Worcester, Mass., Richard virtually took over the basement to build model planes.
“He concentrated exclusively on airplanes that would fly, not merely mantel decorations,” The New York Times wrote of Mr. Whitcomb in 1955. “In the process, he developed a method for doubling the power ordinarily obtained from rubber bands used to turn the propellers.”
Mr. Whitcomb graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1943 and was soon working at the Langley laboratory. He never married, and he spent many nights sleeping on a cot at the lab, his nephew David said.
“More than once, the accounting department had to come down and yell at him for not cashing his paychecks,” David Whitcomb said. “He would use them for book marks.”
He did accept awards, among them the Collier Trophy in 1955 for the most significant aeronautical advance of the year and the National Medal of Science in 1973.
Besides David Whitcomb, Mr. Whitcomb’s survivors include a sister, Marian Conley; a brother, Charles; and a step-brother, Kenneth.
“There’s been a continual drive in me ever since I was a teenager to find a better way to do everything,” Mr. Whitcomb told The Washington Post in 1969. “If a human mind can figure out a better way to do something, let’s do it. I can’t just sit around. I have to think.”
He never learned to fly.
Posted in the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26whitcomb.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1256572946-XiNPBLYC4GRA6kd+UCn+Ig
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