most pressing, and what research wanted doing. To promote free discussion, committee meetings were held to be confidential, and no minutes of the meetings or other printed material provided to the members in the line of duty could be published or even made available to colleagues outside the committee. To the NACA, committee membership was a personal position attaching to the individual because of his expertise and willingness to cooperate with the government in the best interests of American aeronautics. 26

To the industry, committee memberships were positions of considerable prestige that reflected favorably not only on the individual but on his company as well. They provided an opportunity to stay abreast of the latest developments in aeronautics even when those developments were still classified or under the proprietary control of another firm. They provided contact with other experts. And they provided an opportunity to influence the course of NACA research. These undeniable benefits of committee membership led many in industry to advocate distribution of memberships evenly throughout the industry in order to achieve equal representation. If an engineer from Douglas was on the Subcommittee on High-Speed Aerodynamics, then one from Lockheed ought to be on it as well. 27

Informally the NACA had always tried to balance the sources of industry membership on technical committees and subcommittees so that no one company or geographical area would dominate a field. This was common sense, for the NACA wanted the widest possible variety of opinions and perspectives, so long as they came from competent people. All things being equal, the NACA would try to distribute its memberships evenly throughout the aviation industry. But publicly it had to maintain that members were chosen on their merits as private individuals and in no way represented their firms. As Hunsaker remarked early in this debate, "the appointment of industry representatives sounds very innocent, but if they are appointed for the purpose of being representatives, it would upset our applecart." Bush was even more emphatic. He felt that if industry could dictate committee membership, "it would be fatal."28 Although the NACA had allowed industry representation on the Main Committee, the Industry Consulting Committee, and the main technical committees, it publicly insisted that the technical subcommittees remain lily pure.

Although the solution was not ideal, industry soon realized that on this one issue the NACA would not, perhaps even could not, budge. In the later years of the 1940s, therefore, it concentrated on its two main demands. First, the NACA should pursue a research program more suited to the needs of industry and distribute the results more quickly. Second, NACA research should not encroach on the development that industry considered to be its exclusive domain. Industry used its new

strength within the Committee to achieve the first demand. It used its increased influence with Congress and the executive branch of government to ensure the second. Industry effectiveness in this regard is seen most clearly in the saga of the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan.

THE NATIONAL UNITARY WIND TUNNEL PLAN

The "unitary" program originated as two independent (in fact competitive) programs begun almost simultaneously by the Army Air Forces and the NACA and developed along lines so similar that coincidence fails to explain their likeness. The NACA track started in April 1945 with a letter to George Lewis from an employee at the Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland. Bruce Ayer wrote because he felt that the staff at the laboratory had not given "sufficient consideration" to his views. So he went over their heads, taking no little risk in an organization as hierarchically structured and procedurally disciplined as the NACA. Ayer considered the Committee's facilities "woefully inadequate" for the supersonic research of the future, and he recommended an "Altitude and Supersonic Research Laboratory" at a site like the new Bonneville dam on the Columbia River, where there would be ample water for cooling and power generation.29

With this one recommendation, Ayer covered all the major points in the forthcoming technical debate over postwar wind-tunnel facilities in the United States. The advent of jet propulsion meant that research problems of the future would be in high-speed, probably high-altitude, flight. Wind tunnels for this regime would require enormous amounts of power, far beyond the capacity of existing aeronautical research. centers, including those of the NACA.

Ayer received a polite and appreciative response from Lewis, but no action. Not until the following summer when NACA representatives returned from duty with the Alsos mission in Germany did his recommendation win support at headquarters and in Cleveland. The 100,000-horsepower water-driven supersonic wind tunnel under construction by the Germans just outside Munich greatly impressed the NACA representatives, as did a planned 500,000-horsepower tunnel designed to produce mach numbers between 7 and 10. In a 7 November memorandum to headquarters, AERL Manager Edward Sharp concluded that "the utilization of water power for wind tunnel drive appears to be the only feasible method for large supersonic wind tunnels." He recommended that the NACA "Confidentially" contact the Federal Power Commission and the Reclamation Service "with a view to determining the best locations for future laboratory sites at which would be located all of the future large supersonic tunnels to be built in this country." As if that were not clear enough, he went on to state

that "the Committee should at once take steps to preempt this field of high-speed research and an aggressive and vigorous policy should be adopted in the interest of keeping America first in scientific development along these lines." He repeated in closing that the matter should be handled "in the highest confidence." 30

Sharp took this memorandum to Washington personally and discussed it with the staff. John W. Crowley, recently recruited from Langley to fill in for the stricken George Lewis, led the headquarters group that authorized Sharp to pursue the matter. By the time Sharp reported in December, he had abandoned the notion of direct waterpower drive, settled on Boulder Dam near Las Vegas as the best site, and raised the projected power requirements as high as 2,000,000 horsepower, a fourfold increase over that of the largest tunnel the Germans had been planning. The Committee was already considering budgets that would allot twice as much construction money to the new facility as would go to all the rest of the Committee's laboratories combined. 31 In less than nine months the new supersonic laboratory had gone from an unheeded suggestion to the keystone of the NACA's plans for the future.

The issue was presented to the NACA High Speed Panel in December and January and received that group's endorsement, along with the recommendation that the site for the new facility include space to accommodate an extremely long unobstructed runway for takeoff and landing of supersonic aircraft, and an inland missile range for the testing of rockets and pilotless aircraft. When Sharp reported on progress in February 1946, the new facility had been given a name, the Supersonic Research Center. By then Sharp had heard of similar army and navy plans, and he recommended that the NACA take immediate action on its own proposal so that it would not be forced to share the limited number of sites available in the United States. "The hour may already be late," he warned.32

It was late indeed. The army had been working quietly on a similar proposal since June 1945, when it too learned for the first time of the research facilities under construction or planned by the Germans. Moving almost exactly in step with the NACA, the Army Air Forces. investigated the need for new facilities informally at Wright Field, just miles from AERL, until October, when it established a formal committee to prepare plans for an "air engineering development center.” On 10 December 1945 a formal plan was published and sent on its way through Air Force and War Department channels. 33

At the beginning of 1946, then, the NACA and the Army Air Forces each had plans for new research centers, both necessitated by the jet-propulsion revolution, both stimulated by the discovery of advanced facilities in Germany, and both reflecting badly on the NACA, which looked to be once again behind the times. Even as the Committee was sponsoring a sympathetic history of its wartime achievements, to be called Frontiers of Flight, it was learning that the Germans were much further out on the frontier. The NACA was scrambling to catch up and the air force was showing signs of taking on the responsibility itself, 34

Exactly when each side learned of the plans of the other is not clear. At the October 1945 meeting of the NACA, General Arnold mentioned that several agencies wanted supersonic research facilities. Out of the ensuing discussion came a letter from Hunsaker to the secretaries of war and navy reporting the NACA's conclusion that “a unitary program" of aeronautical research, especially with respect to supersonic wind tunnels, was essential to orderly development. He asked the secretaries to add this proposal to the agenda of the Research Board for National Security, which was then considering the overall question of postwar research and development. But the RBNS dissolved before the secretaries could write.

At the 17 December meeting of the Executive Committee, General Crawford reported that the Army Air Forces were considering a super

sonic research center and investigating possible sites. This revelation prompted Edward Sharp to ask a friend at Wright Field about the air force plans. He learned that the center would probably be in the Rocky Mountains, would include five tunnels-one designed to reach mach 8 to 10-and would cost about $100 million. Sharp's friend reported that the air force was acting in good faith and did not intend to violate the NACA's area of fundamental research. He suggested that the Committee contact General Crawford, who would be happy to supply the latest information and who in any case was obliged by his membership on the NACA to be forthcoming on this matter. When the headquarters staff did contact the general, they discovered that his office was "not too enthusiastic" about prospects for the plan, feeling they had "not enough to go to bat with the [Bureau of the B]udget for the dough." Whether that was the truth or an evasion cannot be determined. On 1 March 1946, Hunsaker was still pleading for coordination. Telling the Guided Missiles Committee of the Research and Development Board of the NACA's plans for a supersonic research center, Hunsaker noted that the same facilities "obviously cannot be duplicated for all the services, and that the same tools must be used by all." 35

No evidence of the early cooperation Hunsaker sought has come to light. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence that the NACA and the Army Air Forces were in deep and surreptitious competition. In the NACA meeting room, all was harmony and seeming candor, but behind the scenes there was intense jockeying for position. At the NACA Executive Committee meeting of 21 March 1946, Hunsaker announced that the NACA staff believed there was need for a "National Supersonic Research Center . . . adequate to meet the needs of industry and of the military services." The army and navy representatives agreed that such a project should be large enough to meet future needs of the services, and joined in recommending that the staff prepare a supplemental estimate to be considered at the next meeting. 36

The very next day, however, just three weeks after Hunsaker's plea to the Research and Development Board, General Curtis LeMay, recently appointed to the new office of Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Research and Development, entered the offices of the Aircraft Industries Association (AIA) and presented what were later described by an informant as "beautifully prepared" booklets, one a "sales brochure" for a proposed Air Engineering Development Center, to cost more than half a billion dollars. Industry and AIA personnel who happened to be in the office that day "recognized the project as so large that it could be done only once," and they feared that the NACA, their first choice to run any such facility, was in danger of being forestalled. They were reluctant, however, "to take anything like a formal stand against