 Last item and agenda here is a wrap-up when returning to our own Ed Saltsman for that Ed is currently a senior aerodynamicist with Kentron's planning research Corp staff here at Dryden He's had a no noteworthy career as an aerodynamicist for over 40 years with NACA and NASA Although he retired from Dryden and NASA in 1981. He's continued to work here part-time For one of our engineering support service contractors as I previously mentioned and His career has been spent in conducting aerodynamic research as it affects the performance of vehicles aircraft and ground vehicles and some of you may know that in the early 70s or the Mid 70s and early 80s. He was involved in some work involving trucks and Vans in the era of the first energy crisis So Ed Saltsman a wrap-up, please Okay, thank you. We're gonna need that Most of us here are or have been associates of the Dryden flight research facility and I want to underline the word Dryden remember that one and Today we have honored and dedicated the supercritical wing research airplane Which is in my mind a significant transonic research facility? And I want to underline the word transonic Transonic and Dryden. How do they relate? I'm going to try to establish a link And I believe we'll show that there is a link between Dryden and transonic first next though I'll Indicate four items I want to cover I want to recognize the man Dryden and the place Dryden, which is us Relative to experimental transonic aerodynamics. I also want to recognize the inventor of the supercritical wing concept And how he dominated experimental transonic aerodynamics for at least three decades I want to proclaim that transonic research is not just history and That transonic problems will surely still confront us and Then lastly I want to recognize the people who worked on the supercritical Research airplane here, but now that back to Dryden and transonic And I got to learn how to work this which button do I push to start the slides? Okay Dryden and transonic We want to establish now what transonic is In early 1947 this is the way transonic Considered and as you can see There was quite a gap in theory. There were three experimental methods that were going through the transonic region Meeting the region of love and woes be the sound here, but those three Experimental methods Were qualitative in nature their instrumentation was marginal Two of them required to telemetry which hadn't been developed that well yet and There you were going to have to Establish better theory either on the basis of wind tunnel work or flight and as you can see the airplane hadn't gone supersonic yet or even the speed of sound and The wind tunnels were close to getting there the Slotted throat tunnel was being worked on matter of fact. Dr. Whitman was working on it But the plan was to establish a transonic research facility for flight as well as completing the slotted throat work in the tunnel later in 1947 The aircraft designed for flight work in the transonic region flew Mach 1 in fact it got to Mach 1 number 1.06 Later this airplane flew to nearly one and a half a later pumped up version reached almost two and a half but the thing we should remember is that this was basically a transonic research facility and That's my first link between The place Dryden in this case and transonic research Because the place Dryden is us. We are his namesake The X1 in flying through the transonic drag rise provided a valuable source of data For a wing pressure profile data at transonic speeds as well as stability and control and loads data But I want to point out here That probably doesn't show very well But here in flight data from the 8% wing and the 10% wing where we see drag coefficient plotted against Mach number and This transonic drag rise Which leveled off right about there and proceeded when it went faster is the Drag rise that I want to show a little later in some very very early work done by dr. Dryden And is it also the increment of drag the dr. Whitcombe reduced with the area rule Which we'll also talk about in a little bit now. I want to go a way back in aerodynamic research history back almost as far as Dr. McCurr went earlier this morning not quite that far back perhaps in this case Let's see. Let's pick out something like We'll say the invention of the steam engine would be One end of the time scale we're talking about and the other end might be as far back as milk Thompson's birthday at that time a Young PhD named Hugh Dryden and two co-workers obtained the first data From a ground facility that showed the beginnings of the transonic drag rise Here we have drag coefficient Plotted against in this case. They called it V over C. I wish that showed better for you that are back quite a ways Take my word for it This is V over C Test velocity divided by the speed of sound plotted against drag coefficient for two airfoils of different thicknesses And what they were doing at that time was evaluating airfoil drag characteristics for propeller research Airplanes at this time were flying about a hundred miles an hour most of them the absolute speed record was below 280 To get these data They had to travel to Lynn, Massachusetts and borrow a compressor that was owned by general electric company This compressor was a 5,000 horsepower Compressor that they used to pressurize a large tank that was about 30 feet long and 30 inches in diameter And at one end of this they had an opening of 12 inches below which they placed their airfoil models This in other words, this was a free jet it was very noisy and Incidentally they had to use this borrowed Compressor system just when general electric let them use it so they ended up doing their first tests on Christmas Day in 1923 After the tests it is written here This is by Dryden himself. He says we walked down the street in Lynn after the tests discussing the jet and Notice that passers-by were staring at us strangely and they were shaking their heads It was some time before we discovered that they we had been shouting at each other At the top of our voices. We were both temporarily deaf as a result of working with our heads only a few inches from the large jet Now the primarily thing I wanted to show here was the beginnings of the drag rise and This was done Beginning Christmas Day 1923 they showed the beginning of the drag rise for these various air these two airfoils at various angles of attack Incidentally, they didn't talk about Mach number They talked about velocity ratio And they didn't talk about transonic because there was no such word yet. They talked about a different flow regime and Once in a while they would say in their literature There seems to be a critical condition or a critical velocity It was two years later in 1926 I Think that's when milk was born The Briggs and Dryden his co-worker in case I just showed you and Dryden devised an experiment to obtain pressure data In a pressure distribution form similar to what dr. Whitcomb used and showed to us on The same airfoil shapes that they had tested on Christmas Day in 1923 They wanted to go supersonic this time So they devised the first convergent divergent test nozzle ever tested in the United States that actually provided quantitative Or maybe dr. Dryden would say qualitative, but I've seen the plots and it looks quantitative aerodynamic data This was a two-inch diameter nozzle And it was another open jet the cord of their airfoils was one inch They tested six airfoils that way It was at this time incidentally as I indicated before there was no such word as transonic and Dryden Realized one was needed. So he invented the word and it turned out to be transonic However I'm going to walk away from the mic here now so I can point it out a little better as you can see it Those of you that are close enough It wasn't spelled the way we spell it today. It has two S's There here. It's used again here. It's used again These are excerpts from John Stax 8th Wright Brothers lecture of December in 1944 These two instances of transonic spelled with two S's is from the body of John Stax lecture And then this case here is where dr. Dryden used transonic spelled that way in his commentary on John Stax lecture Dr. Dryden was very logical. His reasoning was like this Transcontinental you take the word trans you take the word continental and you push them together Trans oceanic Why not transonic? three years later dr. Dryden Had left the Bureau of Standards was in the process of leaving the Bureau of Standards and he was on a train ride with dr And professor Theodore von Karman between Aberdeen, Maryland and Washington, D.C. And they were talking about the need for a word to describe this region now the case that I just showed you was In 1944 this is three years later and Dryden said he had a word for it transonic spelled with two S's Von Karman liked the word, but he didn't like the spelling and as you can see that's the way Von Karman wanted to spell it in spite of Dryden's reasonable thinking we all know which spelling has prevailed Von Karman explains it this way He says Dryden was a logical and wanted two S's. I thought it wasn't always necessary To be logical and aeronautics, so I wrote it with one ass very simple in the course of their discussion or argument Dryden took a little convincing So finally dr. Von Karman quoted the German poet Getty Or at least he paraphrased him and said Getty says some logic is desirable But to always be logical is horrible, so I guess Getty had to contend with nerds back in those days So this gives us a glimpse of the connection between Dryden a place and transonic We tested the first transonic airplane here And the place is now named Dryden We are the namesake and of course that was what william's test group called the murach flight test unit We've also established a link between Dryden the man and transonic He generated the first experimental airfoil data demonstrating the critical drag rise He invented the word transonic And he with Briggs designed the first converging diverging test nozzle that provided Real aerodynamic data in this country It's interesting to note that their data with this converging diverging nozzle reached a peak mountain number 1.08 the first x1 plane flight that Exceeded the speed of sound went to 1.06 only a 200s of a mountain number difference between the two now What about the man Whitcomb and transonic research? Well, he dominated transonic aerodynamic research for at least three decades Perhaps I should be corrected and it can be established that it was significantly longer than that he First the part that I know of he was an important part of the team that developed the slotted throat wind tunnel He invented and conceived of the area rule Here we see the yf 102 on the left And the 102a on the right, which is the area ruled one In this case the Wave drag increment was reduced about 25 by the area ruling process here In addition Of course, he invented and conceived of the supercritical wing That we're talking about today And in this case the drag rise mock number of this configuration not the wing now But the configuration was pushed up to about 0.97 And this this is at working lift coefficients. This is at the cruise lift coefficient and as He indicated earlier the drag rise mock number of the wing itself was Just nudging one in addition He invented and conceived of the winglets project the winglets concept In this case the fuel savings were about six percent And later versions Where the wing loading was higher near the tips the savings would be greater now What kind of agency Or technical organization Can spawn if it indeed it did spawn. I didn't want that. How do I cancel it? Spawn Or nurture such an innovative research I like to think it's an organization that can challenge conventional wisdom Conventional wisdom is all right if it's considered for what it really is It's a reasonable starting place But a habitual reliance on conventional wisdom leaves you relatively close to the starting place It increases the odds for the status quo That's why it's encouraging For me to see one of the things That our new administrator said in a recent address Which I already showed you Where he said uh in the new nasa will welcome a diversity of views and ideas from both inside and outside the organization And perhaps the words of uh retiring deputy administrator james thompson That he wrote in the winter issue of the nasa magazine were intended to challenge conventional wisdom when he wrote I think sometimes nasa could use a little more internal controversy Concern about conventional wisdom Isn't limited only to the technical community For example Here are the paraphrased words of a noted 20th century theologian If you and I agree on every matter One of us has ceased thinking And perhaps dr. JB harvey has said it as well as anyone The mismanagement of agreement Not the inability to manage conflict is the single most pressing issue of most modern organizations I wonder Is the spirit conveyed by these four individuals seemingly Expressing concern about conventional wisdom Representative of the environment that dr. Whitcomb worked with in during the years that he dominated the field of experimental transonic aerodynamics Did his revolutionary ideas thrive because he worked in an environment that was unencumbered by conventional wisdom Not quite As obvious as the need was for a revolutionary breakthrough in reducing the transonic wave drag There were a few Who said that the benefits from the area rule were largely finest ratio effects And there was conventional wisdom which claimed that the benefits from the reduced shock strength provided by the supercritical airfoil Would likely be overshadowed cancelled out by high trim drag And some conventional conventional wisdom adherents thought that the winglets were simply extra aspect ratio in disguise They were wrong in every case The original wind tunnel research work at Langley added to the confirmation flight data That was obtained out here at Dryden And the numerous numerous commercial and military applications of these three technologies Have discredited conventional wisdom So the score is Innovative radical transonic research. That's how I like to describe what he did three Conventional wisdom zero We should remember this score as we continue toward nasp And the external burning experiment And follow on supersonic and hypersonic vehicles after that Hypersonic vehicles must still pass through the transonic toll gate There's a toll extracted every time you pass through And dr. Wickham his his research has shown that the cost at the gate can be lowered by innovative experimental work and amazingly enough Even if there is not a red team or a blue team in support That would be an inside thing We have a recent example, uh, by the way, uh That, uh, I think reflects The encroachment of conventional wisdom in the case of some of the airplanes that flew in the Gulf War Some of the data I have looked at and now this would be lift and drag data Of contemporary high performance aircraft used in the war Shall reveal an erosion of aero design finesse A slippage of aero design discipline By discipline, I mean, you know, sticking to the principles Compared to aircraft design and built in the 50s and 60s Uh, to be more specific the way drag is too high And the parasite drag is too high Compared to those earlier airplanes This indicates to me that conventional wisdom does not go away or become old-fashioned Every generation has its own form. In fact It seems to me like it's almost like, uh chicken pox or measles or mumps That every generation has its cases of conventional wisdom Just because Each generation thinks it's more enlightened. It just doesn't work that way further just because, uh This airplane that was dedicated today one of the two An important transonic research facility has been retired Maybe some of you will think of it as a museum piece And I guess it is And it also represents history and transonic research has a history Nevertheless, we should not think of transonic research In historical terms Transonic problems are still with us the brilliant transonic innovations of the 50s and 60s did not revoke the laws of physics concerning transonic flow for future generations It is my hope that the supercritical wing research airplane When I walk by it out there And when other people walk by it is my hope that uh, it will be representative of The uh innovative transonic work of the past, but in addition It should remind us that if we limit transonic research to the past And only consider it history The charges at the toll gate the transonic toll gate Will be unnecessarily high for some future supersonic and hypersonic airplanes Uh, this would be a good place. I think to go back to dr. Dryden and indicate What he said Quote the most important tool in aeronautical research comma even more Than the large wind tunnel comma And then I'd like to add This goes for airplanes too Is the human mind The most important tool for aeronautical research is the human mind Credit that to dr. Dryden This is the end of my perspective on this if you'll call it a wrap up I want to now acknowledge uh team members Uh, both at Langley and here in closing It's appropriate to mention some of the team members who worked with dr. Whitcombe tom kelly peri hanson denis Bartlett James blackwell He's introduced as mickey today. That's what he goes by I understand Uh, larry lofton in an administrative capacity Uh, and out here, uh d beeler in an administrative capacity Ted airs though. He didn't work on their plane that was dedicated today was a team member On the supercritical wing crew back at Langley. Uh, as you've already heard working with, uh, dr. Whitcombe He worked primarily on the Lower aspect ratio attack to application His transfer to dryden significantly raised our transonic and supercritical experience and knowledge out here As for the dryden test research team I want to recognize them in this closing slide And we already know That we don't have all the names on there Lou stairs, for example should be on there and he isn't and I thought of another and I don't believe uh john carry is Uh, what we're going to do After kinsley Finishes is put this back up again Along with a view graph which shows the digital fly bar wire team members and then we'll ask People out in the audience that that know that there are names missing to come up And write them on this tablet, please Uh, so we'll uh blank this out now and we'll try to show it after kin is finished Thank you very much