Lewis’ reporting led to the formation of a “Special Committee on Relation of NACA to National Defense in Time of War,” which recommended in 1938 a Mobilization Plan to build another laboratory (Ames) to relieve the workload on Langley and to disperse NACA’s research facilities so they would be less vulnerable to attack. The concern for shore-based Langley was real; it was threatened by potential U-boat attacks, and its streets and buildings were camouflaged throughout the war. The selection of Ames, near today’s Silicon Valley, led to vulnerabilities to Japanese attacks, which were considered at the time. But as Launius points out, “As much as anything it was about the fact that this is where the aeronautical industry is located by and large, and Langley was too far away.” He believes the facility should have been located in Southern California, where the aviation industry was largely located, but perhaps represented a compromise to allow some greater proximity to Seattle-based Boeing.
Of course, any record of NACA’s engine work must acknowledge that the committee concluded early in the war that while jet engine technology had promise, pursuing it aggressively in the near term when the technology was not yet mature would not be the best use of the organization’s resources.
This move was followed up by a recommendation of NACA’s Special Committee on Aeronautical Research Facilities, chaired by Charles Lindbergh, which “urgently recommend[ed] that an engine research laboratory be constructed at the earliest possible date, in a location easily accessible to the aircraft-engine industry.” The lack of sufficient engine research at that time stemmed from institutional reasons. “At Langley, they gave the best wind tunnels in the world to their researchers,” said Launius. “As a result, the whole agency was pushed toward aerodynamics. So they did little materials work, they did very little engines work,3 they did very little stability work. Those sorts of things were less than aerodynamics. They did great work in airfoils and streamlining. They did work on propellers as opposed to the engines because of their aerodynamics capability. By putting that tool in their hand that’s a very important thing, but it didn’t necessarily push them to really answer the kinds of questions that you would really want in a wartime setting. They were tailor-made to do drag cleanup because they had the wind tunnels. They knew how to use them. A lot of the other things they were less equipped to do.” There was also a historical reason for the dearth of engine research. Participants at a 1916 aviation-engine manufacturers’ conference sponsored by the NACA agreed to leave it up to the automobile industry and the new engine manufacturers that sprang from that industry to conduct their own research and development. This issue wasn’t revisited until war was looming.
The North American XP-51 Mustang was the first aircraft to incorporate an NACA laminar-flow airfoil. This is the second XP-51, which arrived at Langley in March 1943. NASA image
In his NACA history, Model Research, Alex Roland said the requirements of the war “entailed far less fundamental research than the Committee was wont to conduct. The NACA would be drawn instead into testing, cleanup, and refinement of military prototypes of immediate use in the war. Long-range research leading to improved aircraft in the future would have to be abandoned for the duration.”4 But as Joseph R. Chambers, who in the postwar years, ran NASA Langley’s Full Scale Tunnel, observed, “To me the most important thing that the NACA did for the country in World War II was the fact that the country had invested in the NACA facilities and in the expertise that went into those facilities and they were ready when the war came about. Had the country not made the investment in those facilities and the expertise that the people had, we would have been in really bad shape.”
Giving Our Airmen the Edge
When the United States entered the war, the NACA team went all out. “The staff worked six days a week,” noted Chambers. “No vacations. One of the old timers told me in the full-scale wind tunnel in August how terribly hot it was and working night shifts there and have the director of the lab walk in at 1:00 a.m. in the morning and see those guys wearing nothing but jock straps and scrambling to get their clothes on. [Tom] Brokaw got it right. They were really the greatest generation.”