Robert G. Loewy died on 3 January 2025. He was 98 years old.
Loewy’s childhood fascination with airplanes led to an extraordinary career that contributed to many revolutionary advances in aerospace engineering. He joined the U.S. Navy’s Officer Training program, which sent him to Cornell University and then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for his bachelor’s degree, and to MIT for his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering.
Loewy first pursued his professional career in applied engineering at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories, where he developed a rotary wing unsteady aerodynamic model, a groundbreaking contribution to rotorcraft aerodynamics. This model, referred to as “Loewy’s rotary wing theory,” became a cornerstone for understanding the forces acting on helicopter rotor blades. He then moved to the Vertol Division of Boeing where he rose to the position of Chief Technical Engineer while completing his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Loewy was appointed Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force under President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and afterward served as Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Rochester. In 1974, he became Vice President and Provost at RPI, where he founded a Rotorcraft Technology Center of Excellence established by the Army Research Office. After serving as provost, he became the school’s Institute Professor and Director of the Center. In 1993, Loewy assumed the positions of Chair of the Aerospace Engineering School and William R. T. Oaks Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where there is now a library and a lecture series that bear his name. He retired in 2008.
Loewy was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the engineering of rotary-wing, vertical take-off and landing aircraft, and he was a Class of 1993 AIAA Honorary Fellow. He was recognized with the 1958 Lawrence Sperry Award for his work on rotary-wing aircraft, the 1999 Dryden Lectureship in Research (Avionics: A “New” Senior Partner in Aeronautics), and the 2006 Daniel Guggenheim Medal for pioneering contributions to rotary-wing aeroelasticity and unsteady aerodynamics that had an enormous influence on rotary-wing technology and his contributions to education and public service in aeronautics. Loewy also was a recipient of the Spirit of St. Louis Medal given by ASME and the Nikolsky Memorial Lecturer awarded by the Vertical Flight Society.
An AIAA member since 1944, Loewy was participated in the Institute as a member of the Aerospace Department Chair Association, Honors and Awards Committee, and Applied Aerodynamics Technical Committee. He had been an editor of the AIAA Education Series and an editorial advisor to the AIAA Journal.
