Celebrating 100 years of flight: a wealth of previously unexhibited aeronautic articrafts is traveling around the country to commemorate the century of technological advances that have unfolded since Orville and Wilbur Wright changed the world of transportation forever - Science & Technology - Aerospace Design: The Art of Engineering from NASA's Aeronautical Research

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2003

"AEROSPACE DESIGN: The Art of Engineering from NASA's Aeronautical Research" presents a new look at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's wealth of previously unexhibited and unpublished artifacts that not only technological advances in flight over the past century, but present aesthetically striking objects, illustrating how aviation-related forms can be as beautiful as they are functional. It also serves as a pictorial survey documenting aeronautical history and the architects and builders, engineers, and scientists behind these developments.

The exhibition has been created to commemorate the centennial of powered, controlled aviation marked by the landmark flight of the Wright Brothers on Dec. 17, 1903. It features the architecture and engineering of wind tunnels through more than 65 artifacts from the 1930s through the present. These include archetypes that feature designs for conceptual airplanes, past, present, and future.

The primary tool used for aerodynamic engineering is the wind tunnel, although it is just one of the three elements employed for research, the others being computer simulation and flight--testing. A model, meanwhile, is a highly detailed, reduced--scale version of an actual aircraft or spacecraft, and often contains sensors that enable it to predict, from its exposure in a controlled environment, how a real vehicle would fly. Wind tunnels typically are classified by their speed, range, size, and testing capability. For speed alone, there are four categories: subsonic, up to 300 miles per hour; transonic, up to 600 mph; supersonic, for velocities between 600 and 1,000 mph; and hypersonic, beyond 1,000 mph. The size of a wind tunnel always is given in reference to the cross-sectional dimension where the models are put to the test. Finally, there are tunnels with unique testing capabilities that focus on the nuances of aerodynamics, such as spin tunnels that help us understand the spinning characteristics of vehicles in flight. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that all transports manufactured in the world today that pass through the air--whether cars, trucks, trains, planes, rockets, or space ships--have been tested in wind tunnels to ensure that they will perform safely and efficiently.

Ever since Englishman Francis H. Wenham built the world's first wind tunnel in 1871, aeronautical engineers, inventors, and scientists have placed models within them to understand, test, and perfect their designs before building and flying their actual prototypes. This was true even of Orville and Wilbur Wright, who constructed one to test airfoil sections used in their famous Wright Flyer. Since that first successful powered flight, wind tunnels have been constructed throughout the U.S. by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, formed in 1915) and its successor agency, NASA, (formed in 1958). Within these dramatic and sometimes even spectacular constructions, and at other test and flight facilities built for them by architects and contractors, the engineers and designers of NACA and NASA have pioneered numerous advance in aviation, culminating in travel beyond Earth's own atmosphere. Besides the historic dimension, the exhibition showcases some of the latest research being done for aircraft with biologically-inspired forms--things that will make future air travel accident free, environmentally friendly, affordable, and accessible to all.

The idea behind this display takes as a precedent the well-known 1934 show, "Machine Art," held at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where visually--strong industrial objects--from gears to ball bearings to propellers--were exhibited as if they were sculptural art objects. Chicago architect Jeanne Gang has installed these aerospace artifacts to showcase the dynamic forms on loan from NASA's various research centers. "Almost all vortices in nature are invisible," she notes. "The rotation of a fluid cannot be seen unless 'flow' has somehow been made visible. The wind-tunnel models in the 'Aerospace Design' exhibition are critical objects of study for the development of flight, yet of equal importance to this [progress] is the understanding of what cannot be seen. The exploration of invisible airflow is embedded into the shape of every model on display."

Gang's design attempts to give some presence to these invisible forces. Whirls, turbulence, and eddies are all patterns of flow occurring on objects in wind tunnels. The transparent protective vitrines surrounding the models create a fluid-like boundary layer like the air patterns themselves. The convex curve of the gallery is well suited to the array of showcases. Other wind-tunnel objects are displayed on "stings," conically tapered steel mounts that support the models in testing. The idea is to call attention to the beauty of engineers' designs, while reminding the viewer of the unseen forces that helped shape them.

The exhibition is divided into five sections. The first is the "Golden Years." With the formation of NACA, groundbreaking aeronautical research led to the growth in the 1920s and 1930s of technical improvements such as constant-speed propellers and standardized airfoil sections. The years between World War I and the end of World War II also witnessed the rapid development of the airplane, from a handcrafted assemblage of sticks and wires flying at roughly 100 mph to a high-tech machine capable of speeds four to five times that rate. During World War II, NACA conducted tests to improve warplanes manufactured in American factories as part of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "arsenal of democracy," which produced over 300,000 aircraft for the Allies during the conflict. This section of the exhibit includes rare handcrafted wooden models from the 1930s, such as that for a prototype Navy seaplane, the Stearman 85 or XOSS-1 of 1937, showing the streamlined NACA cowling surrounding its engine. The cowling's curved shape enabled aircraft of this era to fly more efficiently by producing less resistance or drag.