E' scomparso il loro padre (e non inventò solo quelle), l'ingegner Richard T. Whitcomb.
Obituary
Richard T. Whitcomb, Designed The Supercritical Airfoil
(Aviation Week & Space Technology - Oct 19 , 2009 , p. 22)
Airliner, fighter or business jet —almost every modern aircraft owes part of its aerodynamic design to one man: Richard T. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 15 in Newport News, Va. He was 89. As a NASA engineer, Whitcomb developed three of the most important post-war innovations in aeronautics: transonic area rule, supercritical airfoil and winglets. Whitcomb, shown above working with a wind-tunnel model of NASA’s TF-8 fitted with his supercritical wing, devoted his career to reducing drag.
Born in Illinois, Whitcomb began by building, flying—and continually improving—rubber-band-powered model airplanes. He studied engineering at Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and in 1943 joined what is now the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, where he worked until retiring in 1980.
Whitcomb began working to reduce the drag that prevented aircraft from going supersonic and in 1951 made a breakthrough that changed the way high-speed aircraft were designed. He realized that transonic drag is a function of the aircraft’s total cross-sectional area, and that narrowing the fuselage where the wing and tail attach would reduce drag.
The “area rule” was quickly applied, with Whitcomb helping to redesign the underperforming Convair YF-102. His work led to the wasp-waisted “Coke bottle” fuselage shape most evident in aircraft like the Northrop F-5, which today is applied to everything from wide-body airliners to business jets to minimize high-speed drag.
Whitcomb was an intuitive aerodynamicist. “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,” Whitcomb told WPI’s Transitions magazine. He would use fingertips and a file to painstakingly shape wind-tunnel models.
In the 1960s, Whitcomb designed the supercritical airfoil, its rounded leading edge, flattened upper surface and cambered aft section delaying the onset of wave drag and allowing aircraft to perform more efficiently. First flight-tested on NASA’s TF-8A, supercritical wings are now used on many aircraft. In the 1970s, with oil prices soaring, Whitcomb took a decades-old idea and perfected the drag-reducing winglet, which is now installed on almost every business jet and a growing number of airliners.
Whitcomb won the Collier Trophy in 1954 for the area rule, and in 1983 received the National Medal of Science. “It’s fair to say he was the most important aerodynamic contributor in the second half of the first century of flight,” says Tom Crouch, aviation historian at the Smithsonian Institution.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/people/featu ... tcomb.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_T._Whitcomb
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regola_delle_aree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_rule
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