Dr. Richard T. “Dick” Whitcomb was a NASA engineer at the Langley Research Center. During his time there he created three incredible aviation innovations, the area rule, the supercritical wing, and the winglet. These three innovations shaped aircraft at the time, and are still very much in use today. These innovations did not always come easily, but have cemented his place in aviation history. Whitcomb was exposed to aircraft and engineering his entire life. He was born to a family of engineers, and grew up building model airplanes and being exposed constantly to big names in aviation such as Charles Lindbergh. When Whitcomb was a teenager, he converted his parents’ basement into a workshop where he improved the performance of model …show more content…
He was given multiple awards throughout and after his career, including the 1954 Collier Trophy for the area rule, and an honorary doctorate degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1956. The results of his work continue to shape the aviation world and are still visible today, so much so that according to Tom Crouch, “Whitcomb’s intellectual fingerprints are on virtually every commercial aircraft flying today” and that “it’s fair to day he was the most important aerodynamic contributor in the second half of the century of flight” (Dunbar, …show more content…
Whitcomb spent so much of his time at the wind tunnel because that was the most advanced testing tool available to him for much of his work, short of modifying and flying actual planes, although that did usually happen later in development. Computers were not nearly advanced enough to simulate the kind of work Whitcomb was doing, nor were they sufficiently small, fast, or user friendly to be convenient until later in his career. Because of this, when he was developing the supercritical foil, Whitcomb used auto body putty to add bulk to a wing and a file to remove it, testing it repeatedly in the wind tunnel until he found the results he was looking