Farewell to the man that gave us supersonic flight:
Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn’t achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the “sound barrier.”
Mr. Whitcomb’s solution was to taper the airplane’s fuselage in a manner he often likened to a Coke bottle, which dramatically reduced drag. Within three years of Mr. Whitcomb’s discovery in 1951, U.S. Air Force interceptors were flying at supersonic speeds.
Initial designs were centered around the shape of bullets, since bullets were known to travel at supersonic speeds. But shock wave build-ups tended to interfere with each other in the three dimensional application of winged flight at transonic flight, when the airflow around the body no longer acts as an incompressible fluid.
Whitcomb’s coke bottle design, when combined with swept wing geometry, permitted high powered aircraft to push through and eventually detach their shock waves.
To be fair, other scientists were there first, including a German named Otto Frenzl in 1943. But Whitcomb – who independently discovered the same phenomenon in 1952 – was the first to successfully operationalize it, giving your correspondent and his friends many moments of hair-on-fire raging around.
For which we thank him.
Cheers to an amazingly talented engineering genius. May he Rest in Peace.
I’ve often wondered how North American Aviation managed to get the F-100 to go supersonic . . . without Area Rule applied.
In the 1950s he proposed the Area Rule. Applied to the subsonic YF-102, the F-102A with the same power was supersonic in level flight.
In the 1960s, he developed supercritical airfoils. More range without using more fuel for airliners, among other things.
In the 1970s, he developed winglets, yet again improving aircraft efficiency.
Any one of those developments would have made a designer’s reputation.
The jury’s not in yet on his oblique-wing supersonic cruise aircraft. Does the same general job as a swing-wing like the F-111 or F-14, but much simpler and lighter required structure. Maybe some day.
Whitcomb belongs up there with Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, a true giant of aerospace, and someone who has had a significantly beneficial impact on our world, particularly the American economy and military edge during the Cold War. He’s the type of person you wish more knew of and respected.
To one day see an SST flying profitably and sustainably (realistically the market for one would probably be relatively small, i.e. few hundred, and they would probably be in the 50 person size range to scalp the passengers willing to pay first class on the busiest and longest routes) would be a thing to behold. Just have to prove we can make quiet overland supersonic flight a reality on something the size of an airliner. The next challenge for aerodynamics.
Sorry, did he invent the coke bottle or was that some other guy, nameless, who deserves the honor of being called the father of supersonic flight?