A New Dimension Wallops Island Flight Test Range

Two-volume collection of case studies on aspects of NACA-NASA research by noted engineers, airmen, historians, museum curators, journalists, and independent scholars. Explores various aspects of how NACA-NASA research took aeronautics from the subsonic to the hypersonic era.-publisher description.

These essays in celebration of the Wright brothers' first flight 100 years ago grew out of presentations by a group of prominent scholars in 2003 at a conference sponsored by the NASA History Division and held at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The volume focuses on the careers of some of the many men and women who helped to realize the dream of flight both through the atmosphere and beyond. These accounts are original and compelling because they examine the history of flight through the lens of biography.

state of the art in aeronautical engineering has been continually accelerated by the development of advanced analysis and design tools. Used in the early design stages for aircraft and spacecraft, these methods have provided a fundamental understanding of physical phenomena and enabled designers to predict and analyze critical characteristics of new vehicles, including the capability to control or modify unsatisfactory behavior. For example, the relatively recent emergence and routine use of extremely power- ful digital computer hardware and software has had a major impact on design capabilities and procedures. Sophisticated new airflow measurement and visualization systems permit the analyst to conduct micro- and macro-studies of properties within flow fields on and off the surfaces of models in advanced wind tunnels. Trade studies of the most efficient geometrical shapes for aircraft can be conducted with blazing speed within a broad scope of integrated technical disciplines, and the use of sophisticated piloted simulators in the vehicle development process permits the most important segment of operations—the human pilot—to make early assessments of the acceptability of the vehicle for its intended mission. Knowledgeable applica- tions of these tools of the trade dramatically reduce risk and redesign, and increase the marketability and safety of new aerospace vehicles.