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Wall Street Journal
Farewell to the man that gave us supersonic flight:
Mr. Richard T. 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.
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