Flights of Discovery: 50 years at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (review)

For over half a century, many of the world’s most advanced aircraft have populated the skies above the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Dryden Flight Research Center. Located in California’s austere Mojave Desert, the Dryden facility began as an adjunct of Muroc Army Airfield during World War II. The designation came from a nearby desert hamlet where the founding family—named Corum—spelled their name backward in defiance of a railroad company’s dictum to use a more acceptable label. In ways that often paralleled the individualistic desert inhabitants who lived in the area and adopted this idiosyncratic name, flight testing characteristically involved planes and technologies that defied accepted conventions. The remoteness of the location, the clarity of desert skies for visual tracking of test airplanes, and the huge expanse of a hardened desert dry lake to accommodate emergency landings made this installation an ideal venue for rigorous testing of many generations of experimental aircraft.

Never the largest of NASA’s centers, Dryden nevertheless played a crucial role in realistic flight testing that either verified or disproved abstract aerodynamic theories and promising wind-tunnel results. In the first two chapters of this succinct survey, Lane Wallace does a good job of establishing the rationale for flight tests and of analyzing the personnel and physical facilities needed to support the arcane requirements of flying sometimes bizarre-looking aircraft. Another four chapters provide a chronological catalog of the principal programs conducted over the past fifty years, concluding with an assessment of future options and arguments for continuing flight research.

Public awareness of the center developed after the rocket-powered X-1 broke the sound barrier in 1947, bringing national headlines. The cold war era and the decade of the 1950s represented the golden age of research, when a growing stable of “X-planes” continued to meet the ever-increasing challenges of high-speed flight. Unique experimental designs such as the X-15 expanded the understanding of ultra-high-speed aerodynamics, aerodynamic heating, control at high altitudes, advanced telemetry systems, data aquisition equipment, and many other factors. These efforts contributed not only to military research and development but also to NASA’s growing commitment to the manned lunar landing program. The 1960s and 1970s brought research projects that enhanced the performance of combat planes and the flying efficiency of airliners, a particularly valuable contribution in an era of spiraling fuel costs. Subsequent programs during the following decades yielded benefits for commercial airlines, general aviation, the Department of Defense, and for aviation safety across the entire spectrum of aircraft operations. Dryden investigated problems of aircraft noise, engine emissions, pilot efficiency, advanced control systems, and a host of additional issues.

“Dryden,” Wallace writes, “is such a small facility that most employees can see, within one or two steps, the direct impact of their efforts on a flyable aircraft” (p. 35). In this vein, she occasionally includes anecdotes about individuals and staff that clearly enhance the narrative. Because the text sometimes echoes the impersonal detail of test results, program specifications, and condensed press releases, these human dimensions are often a welcome relief. Identified as “a professional aviation writer,” Wallace has developed a useful overview of Dryden’s role in postwar flight research. Handsomely produced, the book is copiously illustrated with color plates, has an informative chronology as an appendix, and includes several pages of endnotes.