posted 10-25-2007 04:28 PM               

Thanks for any help you can give.

posted 10-26-2007 11:16 AM               

I may be able to help you out. I'm a former historian with the JSC oral history project (we interviewed Paul back in '99) and am a current historian for the Air Force Research Lab. Our predecessors here at Wright-Patterson did work similar to that at Langley and other NACA sites, but typically with military applications much more in mind. The NACA's work and ours was complementary in many ways, yet different in approach, which gets to the heart of your question. The NACA's job was to provide a base of knowledge in aeronautical science and technology that could be used by aeronautical engineers (industry, gov't, academia, etc.) to understand and design airplanes. Or they might be tasked to solve and understand problems common to aircraft or designs. The issues of technology transition from research to airplane is always a hot topic for us, but I think a less relevant one for the NACA. They provided nearly impeccable information on what designs do and don't work, along with very specific data. You'll still see new airplanes designed with reference to a particular NACA wing number. With that sort of work in mind, what you'll find is that it will be very difficult to point to a particular part of an airplane and say, "That's Paul's work." In rare cases, that may be possible, but I'm not that familiar with his particular research.

What will answer your "so what?" question is an understanding of the context of his research: why was he doing the particular work, how was that problem (or information gap) solved, and how does his work relate? In the timeframe you gave, the issues brought up from WWII combat were at the forefront for the NACA. I did a quick NTRS search for Paul's reports and can make a few comments. In his case, it seems he was trying to understand the aerodynamics of increasingly complicated wing control surfaces. This is something we were interested in, too. For example, flaps went from the simplest hinge type to very complex double slotted flaps. They had lots of problems caused by the complicated airflow around these devices. Throw in tabs, speed brakes, and the like and you've got a bunch of variables that no one understood at the time. That's where the NACA and its wind tunnels come in. They would take the basic problem, simplify it using standardized wings, forces, etc., then experiment to find out what's really going on. By the time they got these problems resolved, jet engines, swept wings, and all that high speed flight stuff revolutionized aerodynamics.

In short, couching the "so what?" question solely in terms of specific airplanes isn't really asking the right question.

I'll be happy to talk with you more offline and will e-mail you next week to discuss.

Cheers,