Foreword

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was an undeniable success. Its name is permanently linked to such dramatic innovations as the NACA cowling, the low-drag airfoil, the transonic wind tunnel, and the X-series research aircraft of the 1940s and 1950s. Equally significant in the evolution of flight were the incremental developments over the years: the NACA family of airfoils, solutions to the problems of aircraft icing, improved ducts and inlets, techniques of streamlining, and proper engine placement on wings and fuselage. The NACA contributed significantly to every United States aircraft built during this country's rise to world preeminence in aviation.

The reasons for this success were many. First among them were the people of the NACA. During years of association with the NACA, from my early days as a test pilot to the culminating period of 1955-1958 when I served as chairman, I never knew a more devoted, hard-working, productive staff. The same may be said for my colleagues and predecessors who served without compensation on the NACA Main Committee and its many subcommittees. Their contributions far outweighed any rewards they received.

The second major reason for the success of the NACA was its institutional structure. Although it was an independent agency directly answerable to the President, it remained remarkably free of the political forces that push and pull so many federal bureaus off course. The committees and staff of the NACA tried to focus on the needs of American aviation, particularly the aviation branches of the military services and the commercial aircraft industry. The NACA fulfilled those obligations without reference to special interests.

A third reason for the success of the NACA was its mission: "the scientific study of the problems of flight with a view to their practical solution. At once sweeping in its implications and narrowly focused in its goals, this mandate guided the NACA throughout its 43 years. It told the Committee what to do without dictating how it was to be done, and it gave the Committee latitude to select its problems even as it insisted on practical applications of the results. The NACA established and maintained its reputation in Congress and the Executive Branch by adhering to this mission.

The story of this remarkable organization is told for the first time in Model Research, which constitutes the official record that the NACA has long deserved. Here are not only the facts and figures that define and particularize the NACA's achievements, but also a story that brings the agency to life in the context of its times. The book traces the NACA from its modest beginnings in World War I through the successes and disappointments of World War II to its transformation into the nucleus of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In these pages appear the gifted persons who made the NACA workJoseph Ames, George Lewis, Hugh Dryden, John Victory, and Jerome Hunsaker, my immediate predecessor as chairman.

Not everyone will agree with all of Professor Roland's interpretations. But I recommend the book nevertheless. The Committee that emerges from these pages is much like the one I knew, and its story is too important to dismiss over differences of interpretation. The NACA was a complex institution that appears different from different perspectives, but its reputation is secure enough to withstand analysis and criticism by any scrupulous historian. The book should stimulate further research on the NACA, and I hope historians will continue to find the NACA as interesting and significant to study as I did to serve. JAMES H. DOOLITTLE

Preface

Throughout most of its history, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was arguably the most important and productive aeronautical research establishment in the world. Between its creation in 1915 and its demise in 1958, it published more than 16,000 reports sought after and exploited by aeronautical engineers throughout the United States and abroad. It developed wind tunnels, as well as other equipment and techniques, that revolutionized aeronautical research. The data that it gathered are still employed in aircraft design. Five times the NACA and its staff won or shared the Collier trophy, America's premier aeronautical prize for the most significant contribution to flight in a given year. Though the NACA had its failures and shortcomings, its reputation for efficiency and effectiveness was so widespread and transcendent that it came to be viewed as something of a model research organization.

The idea of the NACA as a model arose early in its history and continues to the present. One NACA veteran has declared that the NACA's example of government organization for research was a greater contribution than the Committee's technical output. An early NACA chairman asserted that the NACA's unique structure was an indispensable ingredient of its technical success. In 1940, Vannevar Bush modeled the National Defense Research Committee upon the NACA and tried unsuccessfully to model the National Science Foundation upon it as well. In the 1970s much of the aeronautical community favored revival of the NACA to handle all government research and development in civil aviation.

This book examines the NACA as an institution, attempting to explain how and why it functioned and to evaluate it as a research organization. Although the NACA's technical achievements permeate the story, this book is not a technical history. The Committee's research accomplishments are set forth more directly in George C. Gray's Frontiers of Flight: The Story of NACA Research, Jerome C. Hunsaker's "Forty Years of Aeronautical Research," and in the Committee's own technical publications, all of which are described in the appendixes and bibliography. This book is primarily a political and institutional history focusing on the NACA as a model research organization.

The principal themes of this story are three: First are the institutional considerations. Institutions shape and are shaped by the research they conduct. In theory, the Committee's structure and independent status within the federal hierarchy made the NACA an ideal forum wherein all branches of American aeronautics could debate and develop a national research program. In practice, some voices were louder than others and independence bred not freedom but insecurity. Committees can exploit a wide variety of talents and viewpoints, but they can also elevate consensus over wisdom. Industry, excluded at first from NACA councils, came in time to dominate them. Without a solid political base, or even an unequivocal raison d'etre, the NACA engaged in a running war for survival, guarding its flanks against criticism, fighting rearguard actions against forces of abolition or merger, courting allies where it found them-in Congress, the military services, other executive branches, the aircraft industry, and elsewhere-and outflanking enemies as best it could. Political insecurity bred habits of conservatism, self-promotion, reliance on committees of experts, deference to clients, and a concern for territoriality, all of which influenced the style and content of its research program-at least, the research program formulated in Washington. Insulated from the politics of bureaucratic survival, the staffs at the NACA laboratories saw the Committee's research program differently. In the early years, size, geographic proximity, and esprit de corps kept the headquarters and its single laboratory more or less in harmony, diminishing the usual tension between a headquarters and its field installations. Later, expansion weakened the bonds, enhancing the autonomy of the laboratories even as the headquarters sought to enforce its policies through a larger staff and more elaborate operating procedures.

The second theme encompasses personnel policies and how they shaped NACA research. Committed originally to the "scientific study" dictated by its organic legislation, the NACA turned within its first decade to an engineering orientation that it never thereafter abandoned. Engineers held most key positions within the NACA. Young engineers were recruited right out of undergraduate schooling and trained to the NACA style. Loyalty and teamwork were valued above brilliance. Some scientists worked successfully in this environment, and the dividing line between science and engineering often blurred beyond recognition in the complex process of aeronautical research. Still, the NACA remained primarily an engineering organization, with all the advantages and disadvantages such an orientation would entail.

Finally, research equipment shaped the NACA's program fully as much as did its organization and personnel. The wind tunnel dominates aeronautical research just as the microscope dominates biology, the telescope astronomy, and the particle accelerator nuclear physics.