Robert T. Jones - Research

Research

Jones was a researcher at NACA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. As a self-trained aerodynamicist and mathematician, he had built up a national, if not international, reputation through his perceptive and original work at Langley. For this work he was given the IAS Sylvanus Albert Reed Award in 1946. Jones spent much of his time at Langley working in the Stability Research Division, which pioneered many concepts that were incorporated into U.S. aircraft.

In August 1946, Jones transferred to Ames. The genius of Bob Jones seemed, in part, to lie in his remarkable ability to extract the essence of a problem and express it in understandable and useful terms. His approach to problems was always of a fundamental character and often yielded results of broad significance. In addition, Jones' wife Doris, an accomplished mathematician, also joined the Ames staff.

Later, still at Ames, Jones promoted the idea of an oblique wing. (The first known oblique wing design was Blohm & Voss P202, proposed by Richard Vogt in 1942.) His wind tunnel studies indicated that such a wing design on a supersonic transport might achieve twice the fuel economy of an aircraft with conventional wings. The concept was flight tested successfully on the NASA AD-1. This unique plane had a wing which pivoted about the fuselage, remaining perpendicular to it during slow flight and rotating to angles of up to 60 degrees as aircraft speed increased. Analytical and wind tunnel studies that Jones conducted at Ames indicated that a transport-sized oblique-wing aircraft flying at speeds of up to Mach 1.4 (1.4 times the speed of sound) would have substantially better aerodynamic performance than aircraft with conventional wings. A current DARPA project that has been awarded to Northrop Grumman, called the Switchblade is being developed to provide a more efficient UAV for the Air Force.