The NACA: The Most Important Government Agency You Never Heard Of.
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- Опубліковано 28 лип 2022
- I suspect that not one in a thousand Americans is familiar with the work of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and that is truly a tragedy, because the committee had an outsized effect that played a critical role in winning the Second World War, and shepherding the US into the Jet Age.
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Script by THG
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My grandfather worked for NACA as an accountant and then when it became NASA he became an outside contractor on the Apollo program as an accountant. He did the taxes for the astronauts while they were on the Moon and even got John Glenn a tax refund! Good video THG
I cant think of anything more satiafying than litterally surviving hell and back, only to find out youre getting a small check that'll pay for a trip for the family. From the GOV no less!! This world is funny man.
@@MichaelOfRohan HA! Well, lucky for John my grandfather was a very good accountant. He did John's taxes until the day he died.
Here's a good John Glenn story for you, and I had no idea I knew a national secret ever since I was a child.
My family and me are from western Pennsylvania but a few years before I was born my mother was working as a nurse in a hospital in the greater Akron area in Ohio.
When I was a little kid, and this was in the day of the Apollo mission's so everyone even us little kids knew who all the astronauts were, my mother told me the story about how before I was born and she was working in that hospital one night she got on an elevator and there was a couple of nurses and a guy on a gurney with his head wrapped up, she got off on the same floor as them and shortly after one of the nurses told my mom that it was John Glenn on that gurney and that he was being admitted into the hospital with a fairly serious head injury from slipping in the tub and cracking his head pretty bad, well like anyone else would she said "Isn't that something, the man goes into space and comes back OK but slips in the tub and wind's up in the hospital".
Years later probably around 2000 or so I was watching a documentary on the History Channel (back when the subject of a documentary on space travel didn't involve aliens) about US secrets during the space program, one of the secrets that finally could be told since the Cold War was over was the real reason John Glenn was removed from the astronaut rotation for space travel, for years the public was told that Glenn was removed from it because President Kennedy didn't want to risk the life of the first American to orbit the earth in a possible future accident during the program, it'd hurt the morale of the American people should something happen to him so he had Glenn removed from the rotation, when in fact the real reason is because that slip in the tub had given him a serious enough of a head injury that the NASA flight surgeon's removed him from the rotation, but for the sake of the Russian's finding out about something as embarrassing as that slip in the tub and turning it into an embarrassing joke they came up with the Kennedy cover story to explain him being removed from the program and didn't tell the real story until even after the Soviet Union fell.
I'd had no idea about the cover story since it was news from before I was born and grew up having no idea that I was inadvertently in the loop about a national secret.
Those guys went to the moon god sakes! Government should have waived their taxes for life. Hahahah
@@yotaiji012 iirc that was a joke in Apollo 13 the movie
This British person is aware of NACA - one of the major contributions the US has made to the world. Everybody with an interest in aerodynamics and aerofoil design will know of the organisation.
Well said Lad and thanks for your comments! Be safe 🙏
Agreed, and well said.
People that race sailboats also know of NACA. Several of their designs are used on keels and rudders.
Also, they did some fantastic internal combustion engine research. A lot of that information was not used in automotive applications until the 1960's.
Correct. Even the dumbest ass drag racer has heard of a NACA duct.
For those of us interested in Motorsport this government agency is mostly associated with the duct/air inlet named after it.
We use it on airplanes too. Never was sure where ‘NACA’ actually came from.
You're right, that's how I first heard of NACA.
@@mikelp72 yes, I have been in the aerospace industry and have seen them used there - air inlets for intercoolers, radiators etc.
Yes. Their findings also contributed to the changes in the F .1 racing. The Coke bottle affect was used for the McLeran racing team
Agreed, I was aerospace when I was racing on the side and I worked out the connection. They did that and so much more.
Very well done,. NACA DESERVES to be remembered.
In 1972 found out about NACA, and, using their foil shapes, made my sailboat go faster.
Growing up in Lancaster, CA, many of our neighbors and friends worked for NASA at Edwards AFB. Many of my classmates were offspring of aviation legends. As a teenager I used to do yard work and babysit for Bill Dana, the guy who flew the last X-15 mission. I remember Joe Walker attending our church. I remember being herded into the school yard to watch the X-15 drop from the B-52 with F-104 chase planes following. Eventually I became the Community Relations director for Edwards AFB and for 20-years ran the base’s tour program, sharing the facility with thousands of people from all over the world.
That is very cool!
Yes, that is a great story! Mr. Walker has always been a personal hero ever since I was a kid (prolly your age) pouring over the X-15 articles in National Geographic.
They use NACA airfoil sections to fair appendages on sailboats to this day…
The HISTORY GUY has a propensity of selecting topics, easily forgotten, but of historical value.
Thanks HISTORY GUY.
The accomplishments of NACA are still seen today. The airplane I fly at work has what are called “NACA air scoops”. They use outside air to cool various things on the aircraft. It just goes to show how cutting edge their findings were, when 80 years later, their innovations are still found on new jets.
Those same "scoops" found their way onto the Shelby Mustang GT, if I remember correctly. Decorations, but cool.
minimized drag inlet scoops
Fellow CFD engineers will be familiar with the NACA 0012 aerofoil
Its a great legacy to have at our fingertips a literal library of NACA wing and propeller airfoils researched and documented and available for anybody to access in order to design an aircraft with previously researched and known lift drag and stall characteristics.
I am so glad you presented the ‘forgotten’ history of NACA. I taught in aviation technical schools for many years and I always found it difficult to convey the importance of NACA’s research and development in the design of modern aircraft. The young adults just assumed “it was always shaped (or designed) like this”. Many times a student would attempt to correct me by saying “Don’t you mean NASA? What’s this NACA?
We always pronounced it as Naccah, just like Nassah.
To NACA it was always an initialism. NASA initially was as well.
at Wentworth in the 90s, we just said "OK, NACA"
A lesser-known effect of using a laminar flow airfoil on the P-51 Mustang was it allowed them to make the wing relatively thick, which gave it a large internal fuel capacity while also being able to fit a wide track undercarriage with inward-retracting wheels.
My great grandpa grew up in rural Central California and he recalled that almost half maybe more of all crop dusters died when their planes stalled at extremely low altitudes (they flew only a few hundred feet at most above the ground at low speed).
I remember reading about the NACA when I was a kid reading about the X series Research aircraft as well as the research they did during World War II.
NACA ducts! That's all I know of NACA.
This Aussie knows and cherishes NACA due to his love of WW2 era U.S aircraft.
We have NACA to thank for the great American aircraft manufacturers that built the majority of all aircraft in WWII. Had we not had the NACA we would not have had the Grumman Ironworks, the Lockheed Skunkworks, the Douglas Development Department, etc. And when the war was over NACA was rolled into NASA and took us to the moon in 24 years from the end of that war.
Those aircraft manufacturers existed anyways, they simply turned over aircraft or the basic designs of them in the form of models for testing and evaluation then NACA would make recommendations for improvements such as how to improve flaps and things like that, like when Republic turned over a P47 to them and one of the (surprisingly few) suggestions for improvement was to eliminate the V shape at the front of the canopy's windscreen and move the gunsight to the center instead of being off center to the left because of the angle piece that ran down the center of the V shaped windscreen.
They also cataloged all the different wing designs from the different manufacturers including aircraft from other countries along with one's captured from enemies.
An excellent book to read is called Memoirs of an Aeronautical Engineer, written by a guy who worked at NACA during the war and into it's turning into NASA through the Apollo program.
@@dukecraig2402 I am going to find that book!
We all have Abbott's "Theory of Wing Sections" to get us through our days but this sounds like great fun to read!
Six degrees of separation: Half a century ago, as a student at The Johns Hopkins University, I attended many classes in Ames Hall.
Back in the 70s we used their design charts to design offshore oil platforms (especially floating)
I'm so glad I subscribed to your channel for it brings so much information on many levels. Thanks for sharing this with us that watch your channel. Outstanding job sir.
It's a crying shame that our best efforts are directed towards war and destruction! Imagine the opposite!
UA-cam channel Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles cites NACA documents in his videos of WW2 aircraft. A very good look into the amazing work this agency did.
You beat me to this comment. I was pretty sure it would be here.
Both the History Guy and Greg’s Airplanes and Automobiles are great, and complimentary, in their ways. THG is highly researched, factual but less technical, and great enthusiastic fun.
But where are the pirates? ;-)
Came to the comment section looking for mention of this. Was not disappointed.
I knew what NACA was before this video! I’m a naval architect and we use NACA foil sections for propellers and rudders. That’ll always be NACA’s best legacy: the knowledge they gave to the people who build our world.
I'll bet there's a worn copy of "Theory of wing sections" by Abbott and Doenhoff on your bookshelf.
Lol it's 2022 and I still need to use illegible NACA airfoil graphs that inexplicably only contain 3 pixels to do my fluid mechanics homework
I knew NACA because in my teens I learned metal working from an old guy named Norman who taught me how to make a NACA duct. He was like a WWII army aviation mechanic and after the war he worked as a aerospace fabricator/mechanic. Dude was a living piece of the jet age history teaching a teenager in the mid 80's how to form metal. Basically an American hero and I'm glad I got the chance to learn from and work with the man.
In 1950's NACA director Hugh Dryden was one of NACA's titans like Ames and Lewis. Three NASA Centers were named after them, however, Lewis center was renamed Glenn and Dryden Flight Research Center was renamed Armstrong. I felt they should still kept Dryden's name, I think Neil Armstrong would agree as well. While Armstrong flew the iconic X-15, it was Dryden who played a critical role in creating the X-15 program during his time as NACA director. He was to able arrange USAF and Navy to fund the X-15 program but with NACA to manage it. In 1958 and after, NASA continued to manage the X-15.
When NASA was created, Dryden was not interested in becoming the first NASA Administrator. NASA's first administrator was Keith Glennan who agreed as long Dryden was his deputy. When Kennedy appointed James Webb, Webb would not accept unless Dryden became his deputy.
Dryden essentially was director of NASA, though his title suggests otherwise. When NACA became NASA with a massively larger budget it needed a political interface to manage broader government relations. Completely different from managing the operations of a research agency. So Dryden kept his job managing the research while Glennan and Webb handled the politics.
When I first started work at Langley Reseach Center there still a few NACA people around, none I know of now. My building is from the NACA days as is some of our equipment.
Proud to have worked for NASA (as a contractor) for 15 years flying the International Space Station at Johnson Space Center. Another great episode!
The laminar flow wing of the P51 was less about agility than efficient flow resulting in very low drag. This aided in higher speeds and much longer range.
Thanks, Lance, for sharing this important history. As a recently retired Boeing engineer with expertise in aerodynamics, as you would expect, I am well aware of NACA.
Over my 35 year career, I spent countless hours at both Langley and Ames wind tunnel testing for new commercial jet transport designs and researching new testing techniques and technologies. They are both excellent facilities with great personal and are a necessary part of the success of the Boeing commercial jets beginning with the 777 development in the early 1990's, continuing with the development of 747-8/9 derivatives and are a critical enabler of the unprecedented performance 787 airplanes. The high Reynolds number capabilities of both the Ames 11 by 11 foot TWT and the Langley NTF were essential to our work. We couldn't have done it without them!
Consider this my personal letter of thanks to NASA (NACA).
Mark A. Sleppy, Boeing Technical Fellow - Retired
I imagine your team used the quality wind tunnels to be absolutely sure the aero people have their specs and predictions are correct (think tooling for 777 and 787 were already in progress during the WT entry). While 787 had it's implementation problems, at least it didn't experience a F-102 problem.
@@wrightmf Actually, Ames tests directly impacted final high speed lines. But yes, NTF tests were about the technology development and verification and not production testing.
@@volofly2011 Years ago I talked to a MD engineer and he said what can be a big problem is if new aircraft delivered to an airline but what if doesn't have the fuel economy as specified. The aircraft company will then have to owe a penalty fee to the airline for as long as they operate the aircraft. And airlines use their airplanes for YEARS. Yikes, be absolutely sure those drag counts are what they are suppose to be. Nice to know Ames helped with your programs. Of course that is the intent going back to NACA to provide facilities to help US companies be competitive to other nation's companies.
NASA video on Ames UPWT released in 1990, they don't show 777 in the 11 FT but a MD11. ua-cam.com/video/QTGeryOV1AM/v-deo.html
UPWT along with others at LaRC and GRC of the 1949 Unitary Plan so NACA can use top performance wind tunnels for research and support US aircraft manufacturers. This plan was response to airplanes going very high speed and high altitudes. Also a response to the incredible advancements of German aeronautics during WW2. RT Jones of swept wing fame worked at the Ames UPWT which this facility also did tests of the oblique wing airplane that was RT's preferred design (looks like a surfboard flying diagonally).
@@wrightmf Yep, that's pretty neat. I recommend watch at 2x.
In the 11by 11 ft, the control room was opposite the entry so if the tunnel was running you had to go over the tunnel on an open metal staircase. Pretty exciting (and loud) if the tunnel was running at near sonic speeds. I used to call it, "Riding the dragon." But wasn't dangerous by any means, just the thought of all that air moving so fast and you're right on top of it. 😲
Also, as a young engineer the first time I was there testing I thought that big NASA logo on that end cap was so cool. ☺️
I was aware of NACA from the age of 14 but i am a Brit and was designing and building model aircraft. I was looking at at the airfoil sections.
Flown out of Moffet Field. The airship hangar is mind-blowingly tall.
Thank you for this story. Both my parents worked for NACA during ww2. Mom was a computer. Dad was an engineer. My father went on to be a director at Kennedy Space Center.
As a design engineer in the aerospace gas turbine business, of course I've heard of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. I've referred to reports and data from NACA many times.
Throughout their history including being incorporated into NASA they've been responsible for more research and development than any other aeronautical/aerospace group in the history of mankind.
One thing the History Guy doesn't mention here is the fact that NACA is who invented the reverse thruster for jet engine's that both decreases landing distance for aircraft and saves wear and tear on the brakes and tires.
They actually didn't set out to develop the jet engine reverse thruster, they built the first one for some type of testing they were doing but quickly realized their potential as reverse thrusters.
I have had a lifelong interest in aviation but it wasn't until I studied aviation law that I was enlightened about N.A.C.A.
Thank you for covering it so more may know.
My uncle worked for NACA at Langley in Hampton, VA. I found a PDF of a research paper on airfoil testing in wind tunnels he authored back in 1941. Very cool.
I would say more of us than you give credit are aware of the NACA. Part of the maturation of the NACA into the NASA was as much to give German scientists such as Werner Von Braun a "Home" as much as expanding into space travel. Fun fact, a common feature in wide use on both vehicles and aircraft that has an interesting history; The "NACA scoop" NACA duct, also sometimes called a NACA scoop or NACA inlet, is a common form of low-drag air inlet design.
I am one of those that, if I heard of this organization, I do not recall such!
Thank you THG for bringing this to our attention!
I raced bikes and cars all my life and we used their work and formulas for the KAMM TAIL, wing chord to shape and of course NACA DUCTS!!! I’m glad you’ve done this work on them.
I’m one in a thousand! NACA Airfoils.
I can thank the NACA duct being around today for already knowing what NACA was
Spent many of my early years as an engineer at NASA Ames …. All of the buildings I worked in had NACA numbers .
Yes, it's interesting for some of the buildings like N206 they repurposed the original NACA sign and installed with when they modernized the building in 1990s. In later years, they pulled off covers above doorways that had NACA signs to illustrate the heritage.
My father worked for NACA starting in the very early 1950s. It worked out Lewis Research Center Next to Cleveland Hopkins airport and the Plumbrook Station NACA and Atomic Energy Commission neutron reactor at Sandusky Ohio. They worked on the old Aircraft Reactor Experiment and Space auxiliary power systems. High temperature compact Nuclear Reactors that boiled mercury instead of water to make electricity for missions on moon bases space stations and mars exploration fleets. All these projects were under way before the Russians flew Sputnik.
Fighting Fascists with Fascism is really stupid to everyone but the leftwing Fascists.
Did your father have one of those round NACA badges that let him enter any NACA facility nationwide?
I live less than 30 miles from Sandusky and have always known that Plumbrook was there. However, I never knew what type of work was done. Thank you for your insight and thanks to your father for his work!
Here's one for you, my mother had a cousin that was a navigator on a B24 that was shot down and he was killed in August of 44.
My mother was born in 1938 and right after Pearl Harbor my grandfather who was a math teacher and school principal enlisted in the Navy, they gave him a commission and posted him to the Jackson Flight Center in Florida teaching Naval aviation cadets the mathematics of navigation, since she was so young she had no memories of living in western Pennsylvania before the war nor did she have any of her cousin who'd been killed, all she ever knew was that one day in Florida they got bad news about her cousin "Buddy" being killed in the war.
After the war when they returned to Pennsylvania she didn't really know anything about him or the circumstances of his death, she didn't even know for years that he was on a bomber crew only that she'd had a cousin everyone called Buddy or Bud and that he'd been killed, she didn't even know his real name and back in those days people didn't talk about tragedies like that in front of kids and it was impolite to ask about someone like that and their death, if someone wanted you to know they'd tell you one day otherwise you just left it be.
In 2008 I moved to northeastern Ohio about 45 minutes outside of Cleveland and lived there until 2019 when I moved back to Pennsylvania, shortly before moving back I ask my mother how much she knew about her cousin killed in the war that I'd heard mentioned a few times because I wanted to see if I could dig around online and find out anything about him since in this day and age so much information about things like that including government documents and even after action reports can be found online, she told me she didn't really know anything about him not even his real name and his two sisters had died around 2000 so she couldn't ask them but one of them had a daughter that was still alive and she'd ask her.
Just a week or so before moving home she found out his real name and the unit he was in, I was too bust moving to do anything with the information but literally the day after moving home I started digging around and came up with a couple of pieces of information that absolutely blew my mind.
I found the after action reports from his shoot down along with crew records (some of the information was so detailed it was incredible, I can actually tell you the serial number's of the engine's on his B24 the day they were shot down, all just from digging around on the internet), the after action reports from crewmen from three other B24's in the formation said that 3 parachutes were seen coming from the aircraft, of course no one knew whose they were, digging further I found out that it was the pilot and two other crewmen.
So then I Googled the pilots name and "B24 pilot" along with it, turns out he was the only one that survived the war, the other two crewmen died in German POW camps before the war ended, and that not only had he survived but after the war he went on to get a degree in aeronautical engineering and wound up working for NACA and eventually NASA at the facility in the Cleveland by Hopkins Airport and lived only about 30 minutes up the road from where I'd lived for 11 years until his death in 2015, even better I found an online article from a local Cleveland publication that interviewed him and his wife about their war experiences several years before his death, in the interview he mentions my mother's cousin and the fact that they'd gotten to be close, since my mother's cousins last name was Davison he had the nickname on the crew of Davey instead of the family nickname of Buddy he'd grown up with, they also talked about how when the crew was assembled in Boise Idaho Buddy's parents had gone to visit him there and the pilots girlfriend came to Boise to marry him and that they'd gotten to be friends with my family, when the crew was shot down she traveled from NYC to Pennsylvania to be with my family while everyone waited to find out what'd become of who.
NASA also did an oral history with him about his war experiences and his time working for NACA/NASA that I read, in it he mentions that his one son is a professor at Akron University, so I looked him up online at Akron University's website and found an email address for him, I sent him an email explaining who I was and wondered if he had any information about my mother's cousin or even possibly things like crew pictures since our family only has one picture of him in uniform and he's alone in it, about 10 minutes later I got an email from the highly excited son of a WW2 B24 pilot who actually pulled over in traffic to send it to me explaining that he knew exactly who "Davey" was and that his father had talked about him often in life and how his mother had told him about traveling to Pennsylvania to be with my family when everyone found out their aircraft had been shot down, after getting home he sent me crew photos and other crew information including his dad's log book of the targets they'd flown on complete with the dates for them, it not only was a goldmine of information about my mother's little known about cousin who'd died in the war but as it turned out his mother was still alive (at that time, she's since passed) and he gave us her number and we got in contact with her to get some first hand accounts about my mother's cousin from someone who knew him.
Anyone who's interested in reading the online interview with the pilot can Google; "Cleveland.com, Solomon Weiss B24 pilot", also you can find his NASA online oral history of his war experiences and time at NACA/NASA by Googling around and finding it, he had an interesting career that included test flights with Neil Armstrong and how he was part of developing a potassium reactor for the Apollo program.
As far as my mother's cousin and the shooting down of his B24 the after action reports from other aircraft in the formation reads like this;
"During the bombing run on the Ferrara railroad bridge on 27 Aug 44 about two seconds after bomb release at 23,000 ft their aircraft was struck in the #3 engine by flak causing the engine to start burning, about two seconds later it was struck in the fuselage by a second round just forward of the bomb bay causing it to veer to the right and start a slow spiral downward, at approximately 4,000 ft the wing burned through at the #3 engine and folded causing the aircraft to plummet straight downward".
Post mission photo reconnaissance and reports I found online shows that they hit the bridge, so for 2nd Lt Virgil Davison and six other members of his crew the last thing they did in their lives was put their bombs on target, and that's why he's buried in Arlington National Cemetery surrounded by other heroes, which is something else we found out about him from my research that we never knew.
@@wrightmf I remember his rectangular badges from the 1970s I hadn’t been born yet when he had an NACA badge
I learned a little about NACA when researching dimensions for a NACA scoop/air inlet for a race car some friends and I were building back in the late 90s. That's when I learned about their link to modern day NASA. I used to attend air shows at Moffet Field as a youngin.. I live less than 10 miles from there. Applied for an internship at AMES while taking machining classes at DeAnza College. Unfortunately I didn't get in.
Nelson, we need to talk. I also went to Moffett Field
airshows. AND, took classes at DeAnza. (I heard that
Flint Center has been torn down.) Lit that stage once.
I took a machinery class at Ames, my last year at
Fremont. (Oh, Fremont's principal was shot down
in a P-47, and spent time in Stalag Luft III. Noted
for The Great Escape infamy.)
Interesting, that scoop looks a little like the outline
of the dead Space Shuttle. (Saw one of them, at
Ames, during that class.)
steve
@@steveskouson9620
My family lost someone who was a navigator on a B24 that was shot down and he was killed, but the pilot successfully bailed out and was taken POW and was in Stalag Luft III, but it was after the Great Escape incident.
He stayed in contact with our family for years and himself worked for NACA at the Cleveland facility after having went to school after the war and got a degree in aeronautical engineering, he stayed with them after they became NASA and was part of the space program including Apollo.
Happy Birthday NASA
July 29 1958: The U.S. Congress passes legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space.
Cool.
🎂 🇺🇸
Created by a Nahtzee and the results in 2022 show that the Nahtzee left won.
@@Despiser25 Hey Mitch, you might be correct, but the nazis were an extremist right party, not left.
@@dr.barrycohn5461 that's debatable
Been digging through older videos since finding this channel, happy to be early on a new one!
NACA. An acronym I knew fairly well. Growing up some twenty miles from Moffett NAS, Alameda NAS, and the many other airports around the Bay Area, my interest in aircraft piqued quite early. I discovered section 629 in my local library, and devoured it.I have been familiar with many of the people you mentioned for a long time. Living and working near Moffett, I became familiar with many types of aircraft, though the roar of P-3s over my apartment coming in from patrol could be annoying. I later moved near Beale AFB, and had the pleasure of seeing many SR-71s coming in for landing.. BTW, the airfoil and cowling discoveries were applied to many of the balsa wood aircraft I built back in the day.
I gained my love for airplanes due to the P3 as well. Mom and Dad's first apartment was just up the road from NAS Willow Grove.
As a pilot I knew of NACA but not all the history. Thanks
Thanks THG. This vid hit where I lived you might say. My late stepfather was on a NACA advisory board when they became NASA.
As an aero modeler the NACA catalogue of airfoils has been invaluable!
The NACA cowling was based directly from the short chord Townend Ring of Britain.
Thanks History Guy!
When you spoke of the transition from NACA to NASA, I heard echoes of the late great Paul Harvey "And now you know.... ...the rest of the story"
I was an avid reader of Hot Rod magazine in my teens. It was around the middle of 1976 that Hot Rod started talking about the usefulness of NACA ducts on racecars or race-inspired performance cars for street use.
If only private companies could have been involved. Such a huge waste of money.
Fascinating, I never had heard of this agency. Thank you
We consulted the various wing profiles compiled by NACA while I was studying boat building at Southampton University. Aerodynamics is relevant to boats in various ways, not least because it affects the sails & rigging.
My Uncle Geno was an Aeronautical Engineer for NACA. He was a Lt Col in the Army Air corp
Not just an effect on America but the world of aviation!!
The laminar wing of the P51 was not important for "agility" but for very low drag resulting in greater speed and much longer range.
Golly we learn something new every day! I live about 20 minutes from Moffet Field and have a friend who has worked as a contractor for NASA Ames.
Fun fact: Moffett Field is actually in Mountain View, but the planners called it Sunnyvale. Fear was that a higher-up would see the word “mountain” and close down the project.
On Saturday 21 October 2017 the Langley Research Center had an open house. The day before my wife and I drove from upstate NY to take our then 9 year old grandson to attend it. He has always been an aviation enthusiast and we had a great time. As a mechanical engineer I marveled at the wind tunnels and other test facilities - the largest I have ever seen. Seeing some of the actual historical places where such research has been done was a really neat experience. We all enjoyed the day at Langley immensely.
Heard about NACA. Its 90% of what UA-camr P47 Greg talks about
And he can't say the name properly. My dad worked for the NACA and I've corrected him repeatedly, finally unsubscribed.
Good morning from Ft Worth TX to everyone watching.
I knew this! I’m one in a thousand!! Thanks to the book, “The Right Stuff,”
As a former US Army helicopter pilot I would say many of us do in fact not only know about NACA and it's function
great show and i learned about NACA as an aeronautical engineer years ago...they 'wrote the book' on almost every aspect of plane design and flight.
@HootOwl513 is correct that NACA was pronounced "nak ka," even early in the agency's history. Lacking facilities when the Langley Laboratory was founded, researchers would rig up experiments attached to automobiles and race up and down a nearby beach. Locals referred to them as "NACA Nuts" (Nak ka nuts). My wife had an uncle who started working at the Langley Lab in the late 1940's, retiring 55 years later. He knew many of the early researchers and had some interesting stories of how they would improvise experimental equipment. Many of the WWII-era research facilities were still there when I worked at the lab during the 1990's, but most are now gone, having been replaced by "computational fluid dynamics" - computer simulation software.
I’m gonna say it:THG is my favorite UA-cam channel
Never heard of NACA? C'mon History Guy. Great video as usual.
You got straight to the bones of this issue!
NACA was the highlight of driving the Bayshore Freeway ... and once finished, the I-280 took folks over the top of Stanford's linear accelerator and by the radio telescope ...
In the modern "connected world" it's sometimes easy to forget that in Walcott's day, the only way to learn about the overseas state of affairs in various specialised scientific/industrial fields was to get on a ship, go and find some people who hopefully knew what they were talking about, and ask them. His contribution to the field of aeronautics in the US (and by extension, all western nations) cannot be overstated. Thanks for another excellent aviation history vid THG! 👍
"It takes a Paleontologist to deal with the Fossils in Congress," don't ya know?;)
I knew I had heard of it. NACA airfoil profiles was where I had heard of it.
When working at Mooney Aircraft the Aerodymicist had all the NACA papers in hard bound books. They were equivalent to a large set of hardbound encyclopedias.
I have often heard that the NACA Laminar Flow Wing was used on the P-51 Mustang (Mustang name is British as is the bubble canopy and engine "design" for variants P-51 B-NA through P-5 D) not for maneuverability as a 1st consideration but drag reduction which then enabled both higher speed and longer range compared to the Spitfire of the time using the same/strongly similar engine (Packard V-1650 developed/copied from Rolls Royce Merlin ... named after a bird, not magician).
The North American NA-73 Mustang was a British aircraft before it got the P-51 designation. (The RAF wanted North American to build P-40’s but North American thought they could do better - and did).
The difference between the Packard Merlin and Rolls Royce Merlin was the use of US UNF/C fasteners and the tighter manufacturing tolerances on the Packard version.
The P51 did not have a laminar flow wing and the NACA reports after testing the P51 were very clear on that, the fact is the mass production techniques and tooling of the era weren't accurate enough to mass produce a laminar flow wing, even so, had they been able to mass produce them accurately enough the fact is it's wing wasn't structurally sound enough to maintain the precise shape required to keep it laminar flowing, warping and buckling from the stresses of combat and even something as insignificant as bug strikes would have offended it's integrity enough for it to lose its laminar qualities, in other words they tried but the reality is it was never a laminar flow wing except on paper.
The designs and probably even more important the precision tooling required to mass produce a true laminar flow wing wasn't really possible until the jet age, the "Davis" wing of the B24 was another attempt at laminar flow, it's name came from it's designer instead of naming it after a concept but it was also an attempt at laminar flow and it fell short of true laminar performance for the same reasons.
And concerning the tighter tolerances needed to mass produce the Merlin engine aren't because of Packard calling for them, it was actually the Ford plant in England that was task with mass producing the Merlin before Packard is who went to Rolls-Royce and literally said "We can't build engine's this way" , when the people at Rolls-Royce ask if the tolerances were too exact for Ford to mass produce them they replied with "No, they need to be more precise".
What Packard needed changed by the time they were brought into the loop wasn't tighter tolerances, aside from fasteners being changed because of the difference between Wentworth and Standard fasteners (ie thread pitch and shank size because all of Packards in house tool and die making machines were set up to make standard taps and dies) what Packard really needed was the blueprints drawn in a different plane of view, they needed them drawn in the same manner that US industry used at the time.
And the biggest reason that the P51 had a longer range than the Spitfire is simply fuel capacity which is reflected in the weight differences between the two, the Spitfire was designed to defend England and it did a superb job of that during the Battle of Britain, in order for it to have the rate of climb it did so it could take off and climb to intercept the incoming German aircraft it had to be as light as possible, the sacrifice made there was in fuel capacity.
The MK V variant of the Spitfire which was the variant mostly used in the Battle of Britain didn't have the same 2 stage high altitude supercharger that the later MK IX Spitfire had and eventually wound up in the later P51's, even the early Packard built Merlin's only had a single stage supercharger, that supercharger is basically the same type the Allison had when not coupled with a turbo as it's second stage for high altitude performance like in the P38, before the availability of a 2 stage supercharger Merlin in mid 1942 putting one in the P51 wouldn't have made any difference with the P51A, the MK V Spitfire had the same issues with power at altitude as the original Allison powered P51A did, so to give them better performance a little higher up (still not at a true "high" altitude though) the Spitfire had to be lighter and that came at the cost of lightning up it's fuel load.
Later versions of the Spitfire namely the MK IX that had the 2 stage supercharger high altitude version of the Merlin available in mid 1942 enabled them to add some fuel capacity to the Spitfire and increase it's range, the higher altitude that you can get an engine to maintain maximum power the faster the plane because of the decreased drag in the thinner air.
Starting with late C type P51's that were retro fitted with the additional 36 gallon fuel tank in the rear of the fuselage that became standard on the D variant their range increased even more but then again so did it's weight which decreased it's speed until it burned off the extra fuel.
But the increased range of the P51 over the Spitfire isn't because of aerodynamics, the Spitfire was already a pretty slick plane, the P51 may have had slightly less drag but for all the less it was it wouldn't have made the big difference in range between the two, that's simply because it carried more fuel, and that also depends on which variant's of the Spitfire and P51 you're comparing to each other, both increased their fuel capacity in the later variant's, comparing a P51D to a MK V Spitfire isn't really fair because one's a later variant and one's earlier, when the MK V Spitfire was fighting over the Channel in the Battle of Britain the P51 hadn't even been drawn on the back of a napkin yet much less the longest range D variant that didn't really come along until late 43 or early 44.
To get a good idea of the drag that a P51 actually had believe it or not the US fighter (used by US forces) that came in close 2nd to it was the P47, yep, they're not that far apart, the P51 may have had a more aerodynamic nose but the P47 didn't have a big radiator scoop on the bottom of it, people only look at the noses of the two when comparing them in their minds and they forgot all about that big radiator scoop on the bottom of it, that evens things out more than people think, and the Meredith effect is a myth, even if it wasn't it still wouldn't come close to canceling out the amount of drag the scoop has, aircraft design like physics lives by the golden rule that there's no free lunch.
Great episode. And during EAA week on top of it (making Oshkosh, WI the busiest airport in the world). Would love to see a history guy on the Experimental Aircraft Association.
Great work THG... Love the channel, and am thoroughly impressed as always at your depth of research and preparation. Great presentation!
What an amazing story. This deserves a big screen telling like that of Monuments Men
Anyone else binging THG? It's an addiction!
NACA airfoils are a thing! Well done THG - very interesting indeed.
It always blows me away that we went from horseback to the moon in under 100 years. Amazing
Good Show really good show, I have been trying to tell folks about this for years.
$5k in 1915 = $147k today
Prices are 29 Times Higher today than they were 107 years ago
Ooohhhhhh that ending was so smooth!!! Another well done video, thank you!
Excellent as always - Something that may benefit from a deeper dive is the U.S. and U.K. work on exploring transonic phenomenon during the War, which explored the problems caused as airflow over an airplane (and propeller) reached sonic speeds - causing buffeting severe enough to break up a fighter, nose tuck that could not be controlled, loss of control effectiveness, and other often critical issues. It was delicate and dangerous work, which could not be tested on the ground - Due to the chaotic conditions and shock wave reflection in a wind tunnel, speeds between 80% - 120% of the speed of sound could not be tunnel tested. Subsonic speeds - OK, Supersonic Speeds - OK, Transonic (mixed flow) - Here Be Dragons. The Germans get a lot of credit for their explorations of swept wings for high speed flight, (Which they never actually flew before the War ended) but it's often overlooked that Robert T. Jones of the N.A.C.A (They guy listed as the author in the Supersonic Area Rule Tech Report you show) had independently worked out the same results, and was publishing them before the Allies got hold of the German data.
I have known of NACA for decades. They are a key reason the US advanced to world leadership in aviation technology. Their research contributed significantly to the aircraft so justly remembered for helping the Allies win WWII.
Compressibility. The airflow over the elevator was approaching sonic rendering the elevator ineffective.
BTW, a concise biography of Benjamin S. Kelsey and Gordon P. Saville also need to be made, they were instrumental for forging American Air Power, but general public mostly didn't aware of them.
Reading the book "The Power To Fly" there is an entire chapter devoted to it's work! From cooling cowlings to propeller design The NACA studied and experimented with aircraft design right up to the creation of NASA.
As a son of a WWII aviator and a child of the space race, I've known of NACA for a long time, but to my embarrassment, when I started watching this video, I realized I didn't know what the acronym stood for! Thanks for clearing that up, and for giving us a nice concise history of this critical agency.
Absolutely superb episode. Thank you History Guy!
NACA lent their aerodynamic expertise to the development of special features on 60s/70s muscle cars. So lots of car aficionados have heard of NACA....
As a native of the Virginia Peninsula (Hampton, Newport News area), I watched this with pride.
The only thing in your videos more wonderful than the delicious details you weave together is the ever growing and interesting collections you curate. Thank you for both. I think the NACA is what has thus far(at the least) saved our country in a hostile world. And never had I heard of it!
NACA duct on the side of the Lamborghini countach. The first time I learned of this agency.
This was an excellent video. Thank you. I knew about NACA from the YT channel Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles. Greg often quotes (and displays) NACA documents in his videos about WWII aeronautics and how U. S. airplane manufacturers applied their finding to improve things like wing design and turbochargers. I did not know the history of NACA, though, so this was an important addition to my knowledge of this important organization.
When you said Walcott was a paleontologist, I laughed out loud. Fossils are a far cry from aircraft!
I wasn't aware of the huge contributions the NACA made, thanks for sharing
From the bottom of my heart thank you for not once pronouncing the agency's name as NAK UH. It was the N.A.C.A. Too many "experts" get that wrong. Bravo History Guy!
Another great enlightenment. Thanks
love the naca ducts