Close Menu
        Subscribe
    AIAA.org
    Aerospace Research Central
    Subscribe
    Aircraft Design

    100 years of Langley

    Debra WernerBy
    By -
    Three men operating vintage electrical machinery in an industrial setting.
    From left: Eastman Jacobs, Shorty Defoe, Malvern Powell, and Harold Turner. LAL 3310 caption: "In this photo taken on March 15, 1929, a quartet of NACA staff conduct tests on airfoils in the Variable Density Tunnel. (In 1985, the Variable Density Tunnel was declared a National Historic Landmark.)." Photograph published in Winds of Change, 75th Anniversary NASA publication, by James Schultz, Page 33. Photograph published in Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, 1917-1958 by James R. Hansen, Page 104. Caption: "The VDT research team, March 1929. Eastman Jacobs is sitting (far left) at the control panel". Photograph also published in Sixty Years of Aeronautical Research 1917-1977 By David A. Anderton. A NASA publication. Page 14. Caption: "Langley's variable density tunnel, damaged by fire in 1927, was photographed in March, 1929, when tests began again."

    The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics established the United States’ first civilian aeronautics laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, in 1917, a little more than a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright’s historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. For 100 years, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, now NASA Langley Research Center, has played a crucial role in the design, testing and development of aircraft and spacecraft, from its development of wind tunnels that transformed aeronautics research to its lunar landing structure that helped put men on the moon to today’s efforts to explore Mars.

    Here, we show some of the center’s most important achievements.

    1917-1939

    Share.

    About Debra Werner

    A longtime contributor to Aerospace America, Debra is also a correspondent for Space News on the West Coast of the United States.

    Related Posts

    Demo
    Vintage black-and-white photo of an early aerodynamic aircraft model displayed in front of a large wind tunnel.
    A Wright Whirlwind J-5 radial engine mounted in the nose of a representative cabin fuselage with several cowling shapes is tested in the Propellor Research Tunnel in 1928.