Career
In the 1950s, Whitcomb proposed his area rule as regards the drag produced by aircraft on themselves when flying near the speed of sound. Its impact on aircraft design was immediate: the prototype Convair YF-102, for example, was found not to be capable of exceeding the speed of sound in level flight. This was rectified by re-sculpting the fuselage. For his insight, Whitcomb won the Collier Trophy in 1954.
In the 1960s, Whitcomb developed the supercritical airfoil. This was followed in the 1970s by his development of winglets, devices placed on wingtips to reduce the vortices produced there and the drag they induced. These improved the aerodynamic efficiency of wings and today are commonplace on airliners, where they reduce fuel consumption, as well as on sailplanes, where they improve glide ratio.
Whitcomb died in Newport News, Virginia.
Read more about this topic: Richard T. Whitcomb
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)