On March 3rd 1915, a two-paragraph rider to the Naval Appropriations Act created a new
federal agency with a staff of twelve and a budget five thousand dollars.
And then a June 1917 edition of the New York Sun wrote “So far as the average American was
concerned, it was promptly forgotten.” I would imagine not one in a thousand Americans has
ever heard of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics more or less as familiar with their
body of work, but that's too bad. Because they had an outsized effect on American history,
played a critical role in the allied victory in the Second World War and shepherded America
into the jet age. The history of the NACA deserves to be remembered.
In less than a decade the United States went from first in flight with the Wright Brothers flights
in 1903 to lacking behind our European peers. The idea of a National Center for Aeronautical
Research was proposed at least as early as 1911 by the American Aeronautical Society.
In 1912 President Taft appointed a commission to study the creation of a National Aerodynamic
Laboratory, the commission was headed by Robert Woodard, a well-regarded civil engineer,
physicist and mathematician, and president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. But the
effort failed to get an enabling act to create the laboratory, through Congress. One argument
to explain the lagging behind in the development of aircraft that has been frequently made is that
it was the Wright Brothers defending their 1906 patent that had the result of both distracting
the industry and disincentivizing production. There were certainly patent disputes but that is
hardly the only reason. A rather more compelling explanation can be found in a congressional study
whose results were reported in a hearing before the House Committee on Military Affairs in 1913.
Between 1908 and 1913, Germany led the world in government expenditures on
aviation at 28 million dollars. Equivalent, in the same year, the US had spent 435,000
for all federal support of flight-related activity, putting our spending 13th in the world
behind that of Chile and Greece. The US was simply not yet sold on the concept
in an era when aeronautical adventures made the news for accidents as much as for accomplishments.
While the US Secretary of War had requested a 500,000 appropriation for the Army Aeronautical
Division in 1908, Congress had approved none. In fact no money was appropriated between 1908
and 1911. What was there was funded by small surpluses from other War Department accounts.
While 125 thousand dollars was appropriated for 1912 and another hundred thousand for 1913,
by 1913 the entire US Army Aeronautical Division included just 10 aviators and 15 aircraft.
And while the military was having difficulty convincing Congress of the problem, one person who
did recognize it was Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1913,
Walcott funded a fact-finding tour overseas sending a physicist and an aeronautical engineer.
There they establish contacts with European counterparts which would be important later. They
came back in 1914 with a damning report on the disparity of investment in aeronautics between the
United States and European nations. The outbreak of war in 1914 demonstrated the imperative but
offered a new challenge. As President Wilson and national sentiment was to stay out of the war,
thus making any military expenditure suspect, and perceived as a potential threat to US neutrality.
Walcott, with the credibility of the Smithsonian behind him,
was able to convince congressional leaders to include funds for an Aeronautical Research
Organization in the 1915 Naval Appropriations Act. The legislation was just two short paragraphs,
the budget was just five thousand dollars. But the organization thus
created, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, or NACA, would eventually play
a vital role in US aircraft development, particularly during the Second World War.
In an odd twist, Walcott himself was neither a physicist nor an aeronautical engineer.
The man who would play such a critical role in the creation of the organization that so
advanced american aviation…was a paleontologist.
The purpose of the committee was, according to the legislation, “To supervise and direct the
scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solutions.” The committee
represented a panel of 12 people, all unpaid. Two would come from the War Department, two from the
Navy Department and one each from the Smithsonian, officially a trust instrumentality of the United
States. The Weather Bureau and the Bureau of Standards, plus five more members acquainted
with aeronautics. The committee would meet semi-annually, but an executive committee of seven
members would generally keep track of aeronautical problems for the committee to address. First
Chairman of the committee was Brigadier General George P Scriven, Chief Signal Officer of
the Army. Walcott represented the Smithsonian Institute and was the Chairman of the Executive
Committee. The original five members acquainted with aeronautics were all university professors,
among them a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University named Joseph Sweetman Ames.
While the enabling legislation was a political compromise slipped into a naval bill,
the public expectations of the committee were high. A headline in the April 23rd
1915 edition of the Washington DC Evening Star reported on the first meeting of the committee.
It read, “Problems in flying soon to be tackled.” Seems a big order as the budget
for the NACA for the first five years was just five thousand dollars annually.
While Walcott's original idea was to create a national laboratory to study aeronautical science
that would have to wait. The committee was not expected to do any actual research,
they were expected to coordinate and prioritize research that would presumably be done at
universities and military facilities.
But the scope of the problems in flying proved far greater than anticipated, especially as Europe had
already moved into war. The New York Sun wrote in April 1917, “Provision for the National
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was made in the Naval Appropriations Bill passed March 3rd 1915.
At the time there was no adequate conception of the work which would ultimately have to
be done by this committee, just as there was no adequate conception of the tremendous part
which aeronautics was to play in the European war less than a year old, and all subsequent warfare.”
As the US entered the war that it had sought to avoid, The Sun notes how the role the committee
had grown. “Now however it is launched on a campaign of work which is not only of vital
importance for war, but which will be far-reaching in its influence long after the present struggle
is over.” The task before the small, virtually unfunded committee was enormous. Despite the
huge manufacturing capacity of the nation at the outbreak of war only one large factory,
the Curtiss factory in Buffalo New York was producing aircraft. Most aircraft produced in
the United States were built slowly, in small numbers, in small shops. The US military had
few aeronautics training schools and even fewer trained pilots. And you might see the committee
as having failed in the campaign that the Sun had touted during the Great War, with the exception of
some Curtiss-Wright seaplanes used for submarine patrol, US flyers flew planes designed and built
in Europe. And despite robust enlistment, only a handful of American trained flyers
arrived in Europe in time to join the fight. But the US participation in the war was brief,
less than 20 months from the declaration of war to the end of the war the extent of the US
mobilization was actually impressive, astounding even. Our mobilization certainly occurred more
quickly than the Central Powers had planned, but there are limits to how far you can develop
military aviation, essentially from scratch, in 20 months. Still, the committee did important work,
coordinated research on wireless communication for aircraft, coordinated tests of airplane
propellers, tested and established standards for aircraft engines and parts. They advocated for
the creation of more military training facilities and coordinated the return of American officers
who are serving in foreign militaries to train new pilots. Although possibly the most significant
contribution during the Great War was mediating patent disputes between the Glenn Curtiss and
the Wright Martin companies, negotiating a cross-licensing agreement that consolidated
patents. The compromise not only sped aircraft production but did so without the requirement
that the government condemn any patents which would have negatively impacted innovation.
They might not have been able to train a lot of pilots in time to fight in the war, but they
did train a lot of pilots, and that would have a large impact on aviation in America after the war.
The efforts of the committee meant not only that the United States was much better prepared for
the next war, but also on a much more robust path for the development of civil aviation.
While the board was involved in a dizzying array of projects, they had not lost sight of the
original goal of creating a National Aeronautics Research Center including an experimental field
and laboratory, something the board called for in its first report in 1915. Congress finally
agreed to the appropriation and the NACA chose a site near Washington DC in Elizabeth City county.
Ground was broken on the new facility in 1917. At the urging of Walcott the new facility was named
after Samuel Pierpoint Langley, an aviation pioneer who had preceded Walcott as director
of the Smithsonian Institution. The then titled Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, now the
Langley Research Center, was dedicated in June 1920 and had a staff of 11. The new laboratory
included the first of what would become a hallmark of NACA research, a wind tunnel. The first was
small and outdated but by 1931 the facility was operating multiple tunnels, including the largest
wind tunnel in the world capable of testing full-sized aircraft and eventually spacecraft.
Work largely done at Langley in the post-war era established the NACA as one of the premier
aeronautical research organizations in the world, and the facility at Langley attracted engineers
from all over the country. One of their most significant contributions of the interwar era was
the NACA cowling. Radial engines were generally seen as the most efficient for propeller driven
aircraft, but they were air-cooled. Conventional wisdom was that they had to be left essentially
open in order to get the air flow needed to cool them but that created significant drag.
The question brought to the NACA was, “Could a radial engine be made more aerodynamic while still
getting sufficient airflow for cooling?” Developed by NACA engineer Frank Weick, the cowling reduced
the drag of air-cooled radial engines. The design redirects and accelerates differential airflow in
much the same way that a wing produces lift, but directs the airflow so that it produces thrust,
reducing drag by around 60 percent. By redirecting the air over the cylinder heads,
the cowling actually improved engine cooling while increasing the top speed of aircraft
tested by an astonishing 16 percent. In 1929, flier Frank Hawks broke the Los Angeles to New
York non-stop speed record with a time of 18 hours and 13 minutes in a Lockheed Air Express equipped
with the NACA cowling. Officials at Lockheed insisted that the record would not have been
possible without the cowling. The design was a breakthrough, the NACA estimated that the possible
fuel savings alone from industry adoption of the cowling would have saved millions of dollars more
than the entire appropriations that had ever been made for the NACA since its inception.
The attention gained by the discovery was a victory for the NACA and perhaps more importantly,
Auburn University history Professor James Hanson noted in a 1998 NASA publication,
From Engineering Science to Big Science, “For the methodology of engineering research,
the NACA cowling changed aviation. After its invention a version was used on virtually every
radial engine aircraft, including those that powered the great bomber fleets of the Second
World War. But it really changed the Edison version of invention as a matter of inspiration
to one of rigorous testing and experiment.” In brief, while the nature of the accomplishment
might have been somewhat misunderstood and in some ways deliberately oversold,
at the time it sold stakeholders, particularly Congress, on the NACA and its laboratory model.
Meanwhile the committee was instrumental in coordinating assistance among governmental
agencies to ensure the success of air mail by the post office, coordinated with the weather bureau
to establish stations for measuring atmospheric phenomenon, and developing plans to prepare for
the military a reserve aerial program which would make them better prepared in case of another war.
Langley ran full-scale flight tests, and in doing so established guidelines and
procedures for such tests, and pioneer processes for training test pilots.
Experiments using the NACA wind tunnels improved propeller design and aircraft aerodynamics,
and improved the value of retractable landing gear. The NACA demonstrated that the placement
for multi-engine aircraft was more efficient when incorporated into the wing structure, an important
part of the design of the large multi-engine commercial aircraft of the interwar era as
well as the multi-engine bombers of the Second World War. They developed a numerical system
that allowed a standardized understanding of airfoils and developed the Laminar Flow Airfoil
which reduced drag. The system is still used in the design of airfoil wings of modern aircraft.
As the 1930s progressed it became clear to NACA people watching Europe that European nations,
particularly Germany and Italy were making increased commitments to aeronautical research,
and that much of that effort was focused on military aircraft development. It became obvious
that the NACA would have to expand its facilities. The Navy advocated for a facility on the West
Coast near the growing aircraft industry in California. A new laboratory was authorized at an
airfield near Sunnyvale California called Moffett Field. Originally built as a naval air station as
the home of the base for the rigid airship USS Macon that was then under the jurisdiction of
the army, they named the new facility after Joseph Ames who had replaced Charles Walcott
as director of the NACA in 1927. The Ames Research Center opened in 1939. An additional
aircraft engine research facility was opened near Cleveland, the center of manufacturing.
So how important was the NACA to the war? Well for example, the Laminar Wing was a key design
element that allowed for the notable agility of the North American P-51 Mustang, considered
one of the best fighter aircraft of the war. According to history Professor Roger E Bilsten
writing in the third edition of the NASA history series, Orders of Magnitude, A History of the NACA
and NASA, when the Boeing Model 299, the prototype for the B-17 performance exceeded expectations,
Boeing sent a letter of appreciation to the NACA for its contributions to the plane's flaps,
airfoil and engine cowlings. The letter wrote, “It appears your organization can claim a considerable
share in the success of this particular design.” In particular, manufacturers faced difficulty
with engine performance at high altitudes, the NACA developed standards and testing methods
that allowed the development of superchargers. Nearly every US military aviation power plant
of the war utilized the results of this research in forced induction systems that gave US planes
a performance advantage over 15,000 feet that their Axis adversaries never matched.
The NACA wind tunnels proved exceptionally useful for funding design elements that disrupted airflow
allowing manufacturers to clean up designs in ways that improved efficiency and performance. That
service was performed on the prototypes of the Grumman F4 Wildcat, the Republic P47 Thunderbolt
and the Chance Vought F4U Corsair. When the Lockheed P-38 Lightning demonstrated problems with
loss of control during high-speed dives, NACA wind tunnel experiments identified the reason and led
to the development of dive flaps that were then incorporated into numerous aircraft designs saving
pilots lives. This research would prove critical later in understanding forces at transonic speeds.
Wind tunnel testing of larger planes was done with models, the NACA wind tunnels were used
in the design of the Boeing B-29. NACA testing determined the most survivable ways for airplanes
to ditch in the ocean, again saving lives and developing procedures still relevant today.
A January 1944 editorial in the General Aviation stated, “How much is it worth to this country
to make sure that we don't find the Luftwaffe, our superiors, when we start the Second Front.
We spend in one night over Berlin more than 20,000,000, the NACA requires now
17,546,700 for this year's work. These raids are prime factors in winning the war,
how can we do more towards victory than by spending the price of one air raid in research
that will keep our air forces in the position, which the NACA has made possible.”
How powerful was the effect of the NACA on the war? It would be impractical to try to list all
the projects, not to mention the efforts to coordinate aeronautical research design and
development in which the NACA was involved over the war years. But in a simple sense,
NACA efforts gave the Allies advantages in military aeronautics that the Axis was
never able to match. Certainly some of the most significant military aircraft designs
fielded by the United States during the war were significantly improved due to the efforts of the
NACA. Even the Trinity Project owes its debt to the NACA as the planes to which the NACA made such
a significant contribution were the only means at the time to deliver the product of their work.
The role played in the war was represented in the growth of the agency. In 1938, the Langley
staff was 429, in 1945 it was more than three thousand. After the war, the NACA was the agency
in charge of testing and development of the Bell X-1 and helped to develop the X-15. NACA research
on the aerodynamic forces encountered during transonic flight and supersonic flight provided
the fundamental design roles that were applied to the early US military jet aircraft such as the
Convair F-102 Delta Dagger and the Grumman F11 Tiger and the B-58 Hustler. These design roles,
the Whitcomb Area Rule named after NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb and the Supersonic Area Rule
developed by NACA engineer Robert T Jones, both of which regard drag and efficiency,
are critical elements used in the design of virtually all high-performance aircraft today.
In 1958 after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the United States decided that they needed to
consolidate all their aeronautical research and rocketry programs into a single civilian agency.
When NASA was created in 1958 they absorbed all the facilities and the 8,000 employees of the
NACA. It is fair to say that the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was the foundation
upon which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded. And NASA continues
the mission of the NACA today still a major contributor to the development of aeronautical
science and aviation technology because after all the a in NASA stands for aeronautics.
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