The Bird is on the Wing: Aerodynamics and the Progress of the American Airplane (review)

James Hansen writes that The Bird Is on the Wing is "an offshoot of a . . . project supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration History Office to document the history of aerodynamics in America" (p. ix), which will include more than a thousand annotated primary sources. The first of the project's six volumes, The Ascent of the Airplane, was published in 2003, and the others will appear by 2006. In The Bird Is on the Wing, Hansen speaks of the airplane as being one of the defining technologies of the twentieth century, in the same sense in which one may speak of the steam engine as the defining technology of the industrial revolution. But there is a big difference. While the steam engine's underlying science, classical thermodynamics, was not elaborated until long after James Watt introduced the separate condenser, one could not build a successful flying machine without some knowledge of aerodynamics.

Although suitable power plants existed before the Wright brothers built their Flyer, it was essential to devise a rudimentary but practical aerodynamics of airfoils before flying at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. Most pioneers from Otto Lilienthal on seemed to understand this necessity. In fact, the earliest successful study of modern theoretical aerodynamics was Kutta's analysis of the Lilienthal circular-arc airfoil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such studies were starting to influence airplane design by the beginning of the Great War. Aerodynamics and the airplane advanced, so to speak, arm in arm.

Hansen provides the reader with a brief review of the attempts to build a flying machine as far back as the work of Sir George Cayley at the end of the eighteenth century and on up to those of Samuel P. Langley at the beginning of the twentieth. (This reviewer, having read all of Langley's writings on aeronautics, tends toward an iconoclastic view of his efforts: if Langley had stayed with experimental astrophysics and running the Smithsonian Institution, the history of aeronautics would hardly have been altered.) Then, Hansen's unusually well-illustrated text covers an immense amount of material, some of it at a very sophisticated level, on the development of American aerodynamics and airplanes. The work entailed in mastering the difficult portions of the narrative will be amply rewarded. Not only does Hansen address science and technology, he also provides interesting and lively sketches of many of the people involved in the development of American aeronautics.

My only reservation about this fine book rests on my different view of "The Rise and Fall of the SST," the subject of chapter 5. As long as there are pork barrels to be filled and political capital to be made there will be vested interests in commercial transonic and supersonic flight. Concorde was certainly not poorly designed, but eventually economics would have to trump the desires of true believers. Only the military can afford technologies that are inherently uneconomic.

This reviewer looks forward to reading NASA's six-volume documentary history, for which The Bird Is on the Wing has whetted my appetite.