6

The Uses of Adversity, 1931-1936

The NACA had more reason than most to view the economic bubble of the late 1920s through rose-colored glasses. The wave of prosperity and optimism that swept the country toward overexpansion carried the aviation industry on its crest. From 1926 to 1929, the dollar value of American aircraft production increased fivefold, while the stock in certain companies jumped tenfold in even shorter periods. Aircraft manufacturing-of both airframes and engines-achieved the growth and vitality that the members of the NACA had espoused and had all along considered essential to American aeronautical supremacy. And in the wake of Lindbergh's flight to Paris, passenger aviation showed signs of becoming a popular and self-sustaining industry in its own right.1

The NACA rode the same wave. In 1929 it won its first Collier trophy; its laboratory was widely conceded to be the best and most productive in the world; and Congress had recently approved even more new equipment. Everything grew at a great rate, and the horizon looked limitless. In June 1929, just four months before the stockmarket crash that burst the bubble, John Victory wrote to a friend:

Things have been so dull in the stock market . . . I think things will get even a little lower toward the end of the fiscal year and that after the middle of July they will definitely be on the up-trend. Moral, buy early in July-most anything.

Nor was Victory the only one in the NACA convinced that things had nowhere to go but up. In the fall of 1929 the Committee took delivery of a new staff car, a $4000 Pierce-Arrow to replace the Franklin that had served since the comparatively lean days of 1924.2

REORGANIZATION

The Great Depression, of course, turned on questions of business and economics, and the NACA was nominally a government agency at least one remove from the vagaries of the marketplace. Still, the NACA was always very much alive to the condition of the aircraft industry and the national environment in general, so the Depression was bound to affect the Committee's behavior. Like most institutions, the NACA at first responded somewhat ambiguously, discounting the gravity of the crisis and conducting business as usual. But as the Depression deepened, as the Committee encountered financial problems of its own, and as charges of corruption and profiteering were leveled at the aircraft industry, the NACA sought to put some distance between its own skirts and the crumbling and discredited world of commercial enterprise. While continuing to assist the aircraft industry and allowing a high proportion of industry representatives on its technical subcommittees, the NACA retreated from the organizational commitment it had made to commercial aviation in the heyday of the late 1920s. This retreat appears most clearly in the shifting committee structure of the early 1930s.

In 1930, the Committee on Problems of Air Navigation and its three subcommittees constituted a group second only to the Committee on Materials for Aircraft in the proportion of industry representatives. These committees suffered heavily in the Depression. In 1931 the subcommittee on Problems of Communication-the only NACA committee before World War II to have an industry representative as chairman-was discharged, ostensibly because its functions overlapped those of the Liaison Committee on Aeronautic Radio Research of the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce. In 1935, the entire Air Navigation Committee was discharged, as was its Subcommittee on Instruments. The only survivor was the Subcommittee on Meteorological Problems, which was transferred to the Committee on Aerodynamics.4

The Committee on Materials for Aircraft, another bastion of industry representation, underwent similar changes, though here technological forces were also at work. In 1931 a new Subcommittee on Miscellaneous Materials absorbed the dated and moribund subcommittees on Woods and Glues and on Coverings, Dopes, and Protective Coatings. This move away from wood and cloth aircraft bodies of the 1920s into all-metal, stressed-skin aircraft also was reflected in the creation of the Subcommittee on Research Program on Monocoque Design, which sat from 1931 to 1936. The industry lost no representation in this shuffle, but the NACA achieved a committee structure at once more workable and more justifiable on the basis of where the NACA sought industry representation. 5

The blurring of industry visibility within the NACA was prompted in part by the Committee staff's growing preference for government members on committees. The NACA got along well with other government agencies; by 1930 it felt free for the first time to disband its charter Committee on Government Relations. Government representatives were readily available in Washington to attend meetings of technical committees and there was little suspicion or tension among them over confidentiality and the advancement of special interests in the meeting room.6

During the Depression the NACA emphasized research of primary interest to the military services, in the belief that the results would eventually trickle down to commercial aviation. Of the Committee's investigations on airships, for example, "the major portion [were] made at the request of the military services." But, as the NACA made clear in a resumé of that research, the Committee "endeavored to arrange the work so as to obtain data of general application and thereby acquire for public use knowledge essential to the development of airships."

NACA research on airships, which began in 1922, peaked in the 1930s, after the creation of the Subcommittee on Airships in 1927, chaired first by Edward P. Warner and then by Jerome Hunsaker. The United States enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of helium, a safer though less efficient gas than volatile hydrogen; to many enthusiasts, including some within the NACA, this suggested a bright future for lighter-than-air craft in America, in spite of the accidents that continually plagued airships. After the crash of the Roma in 1922, George Lewis predicted that "one, two, or three such accidents can not definitely stop the development of lighter-than-air craft.” But by the time this strange era in aviation history was over, more than a third of the world's 161 airships had been destroyed in accidents, the most dramatic being the Hindenburg crash of 1937. That disaster virtually eliminated airships from American skies, though it did not end military interest in the craft nor diminish NACA enthusiasm for their potential, including their usefulness in fundamental research on bodiesof-revolution in a fluid stream. The Subcommittee on Airships survived until World War II, and as late as 1948, John Victory was still advising the Bureau of the Budget that airships had great promise and were still far from the “zenith" of their development. So long as the military services continued to believe in a project, the NACA was not reluctant to make public its own support.

Seaplanes presented a similar case. Though the NACA recognized the commercial potential of seaplanes and noted this advantage when creating its Subcommittee on Seaplanes in 1935, still it populated that committee entirely with government members under the chairmanship

of a naval officer. Some new NACA committees (like Aircraft Fuels, also formed in 1935) had interests equally applicable to commercial and military aviation, but the drift of committee structure was away from obvious ties to the industry and toward more apparent service to the military.9

Behind the scenes, the NACA was more accommodating to industry. Most importantly, the Committee worked out procedures in these years to conduct research for industry on a reimbursable basis. During the 1920s, the NACA had generally refused to test industry models in its wind tunnels on the grounds that the NACA was in the business of conducting fundamental research applicable to all flight, not isolated research on specific prototypes. Furthermore, argued the Committee, an inordinate amount of time was required to clear a wind tunnel, set up an industry model, and run the tests-time that could be more advantageously spent on basic research. Finally, the results of NACA investigations were by definition public property that the Committee could not in good conscience promise to keep secret for the benefit of private interests. Thus it had advised the industry to use private wind tunnels or those at educational institutions. 10 This last argument, of course, lost its force after the NACA became the only agency in the country with such specialized tools as the variable-density wind tunnel or the propeller-research tunnel.

Sometime in the first half of the 1930s, the NACA position changed. Prodded by the Bureau of the Budget while preparing its fiscal-year 1932 appropriation request, the Committee began to consider how and under what circumstances it might conduct research for industry. Rejecting a BoB suggestion that it seek legislative approval for such action as the National Bureau of Standards had done, the Committee established a policy on conducting investigations for private industry and developed a table of fees. The policy, first approved in 1931 and amended in 1936, restricted the Committee to answering specific requests from American sources for research that only the NACA was equipped to perform. The requestor had to make a deposit equal to the estimated cost plus a 100-percent fee, supply the model and any other special apparatus needed, and make a deposit covering additional costs before any additional work would begin. The NACA agreed to forward to the manufacturer the results of the investigation but retained the right to use them for the benefit of the government, and most importantly to release them to the public at its own discretion. The manufacturer thus gave up absolute proprietary rights to the results on the understanding that the NACA would not release the information unless it was deemed to be in the national interest.11 By establishing this costly fee system and by failing to guarantee the confidentiality of new ideas, the NACA once more created a policy that,

however unconsciously, favored the large manufacturers at the expense of the small, and widened the gap between those hoping to enter the aircraft business and those already established. More than one Langley staff member felt that Martin Aircraft Company and Boeing Aircraft Corporation, for example, abused the privilege of access to the Committee's facilities and in fact used the laboratory for research and development work neither covered by the regulations nor constituting a proper function of the Committee. 12

Tests for the military, like this one on a Navy 03U-1 Corsair in 1931, took priority over industry research. This, incidentally, was the first test conducted in the Langley full-scale wind tunnel. (LaRC)

Such criticisms, however, were kept within the NACA family, as were other observations on the growing role of the industry in the affairs of the NACA. In 1931, for example, when the death of Samuel W. Stratton created a vacancy on the Main Committee, Joseph Ames wrote candidly to Victory about the advisability of choosing a replacement from among three industry men who seemed the most qualified