NACA Show

Of the 170 aeronautical designers, builders and editors who sailed down the Potomac from Washington last week for the annual show of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the one who had most fun was 60-year-old Pioneer Airman Orville Wright. Last year at NACA's laboratory at Langley Field. Va. he had seen the new half-mile testing channel through which seaplane hulls are whisked 60 m.p.h by an electric towing car. He had thought about it many times since then. Last week he gazed at it again, finally asked if he might have a ride. With Dr. Charles Frederick Marvin, 73. chief of the U. S. Weather Bureau. Aeronaut Wright climbed aboard the car which straddles the channel, grinned happily as it scooted along, throwing spray from its towing apparatus. (Next day Mr. Wright visited Kitty Hawk. N. C.; strolled about Kill Devil Hill where he and his late brother Wilbur made the first airplane flight, saw the memorial beacon being erected there.)

As he has done for five years, Dr. Joseph Sweetman Ames, chairman of NACA, played host to the show visitors, pointed with pride to the committee's research accomplishments of the twelvemonth. What the visitors saw:

P:An airplane wing enclosing within its trailing edge a flap which the pilot may extrude and withdraw. Extruded, the flap increases the maximum lift by 250%, increases the speed range ratio (difference between top speed and minimum landing speed) by about the same degree.

P:A Fairchild monoplane equipped with a small fixed winglet above and ahead of the leading edge of each wing section. The device retards the top speed by only 2 1/2 m.p.h., cuts landing speed by 10 m.p h.

Landed at abnormally steep gliding angles, the plane rolled to a stop in three times its length.

P:A "zap" wing consisting of a depressible flap at the trailing edge which doubles the maximum lift and the speed range ratio.

P:A vertical wind tunnel through which smoke is poured around a suspended plane model, to expose the tricks of air currents causing the dread tailspin. Photographs indicated that, the prime obstacle to recovery from a spin is the "blanketing" of the rudder by the horizontal tail surfaces.

What the visitors heard:

P:That 600 m.p.h. is the maximum speed to be hoped for with wing sections now in use.*

P:That 1,200 r.p.m. is the maximum efficient speed for propellers; for higher power, geared propellers of greater diameter, deeper pitch, slower speeds should be used.

Not present at Langley Field last week was NACA's most violent critic, Publisher Frank A. Tichenor of Aero Digest. In his March issue Publisher Tichenor reopened his recurrent bombardment of the committee, charging that it fails in its stated purpose "to supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight"; that the committee is not creative, merely a measuring agency of work originated by others; that its $1,488,000 Government appropriation could be saved by merger of the laboratories with those of the Bureau of Standards, the Army Research Department at Wikht Field, or the Naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia.

* After an Italian pilot raced a seaplane at 463 m.p.h. (unofficial) last fortnight, Air Minister Italo Balbo told the Italian Senate that within ten years planes will fly 625 m.p.h.

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