The Grand Designers: The Evolution of the Airplane in the 20th Century by John D. Anderson Jr. (review)

Even the most cursory comparison of a Wright Flyer and a modern airliner leaves no doubt about the dizzying rate of change in aircraft technology throughout the twentieth century. In his latest book, National Air & Space Museum Curator of Aerodynamics John D. Anderson Jr. investigates what he describes as the “intellectual methodology” of conceptual aircraft design that drove the swift improvement of aviation technology. Anderson follows the careers of several “grand designers”—the Wright Brothers, Frank Barnwell, Arthur Raymond, R. J. Mitchell, Edgar Schmued, and Kelly Johnson—revealing the design processes these men used to transform their ideas into highly successful aircraft.

As Anderson explains, conceptual design is the first stage in creating a new airplane. Generally, the designer starts with a blank sheet of paper, then establishes the basic layout that will ideally meet the potential users’ performance requirements. Alongside their analysis of experimental data, aircraft designers marshal their experience, intuition, and aesthetic preferences to mold their creations.

Anderson argues that despite differing personalities and education, all of his “grand designers” used the same basic methodology to establish and refine their conceptual designs. He begins with the nineteenth-century rudimentary flying machines, whose creators largely lacked a cohesive design methodology. In chapter two, Anderson reveals how the Wright Brothers were the first to create a “rational methodology” for aircraft design. In addition to understanding the airplane as a system, the brothers refined their design using mathematical parameters such as weight, lift coefficients, and velocity. These “design points” focused their design and experimentation process, eventually garnering them success where so many others failed.

Yet the next designer, Frank Barnwell, is at the heart of The Grand Designers. Anderson argues that Barnwell, a fixture of the British aircraft industry until his death in 1928, set the “gold standard” for conceptual design. In his 1916 book Aeroplane Design, Barnwell described his process as starting with a precise outline of requirements before making a weight estimate. The requirements and projected weight then determined the desired performance parameters for the aircraft (such as the lift-to-drag ratio). Only then did the designer sketch a basic layout. Barnwell then reevaluated the estimated performance of the aircraft and made adjustments. Anderson argues that Barnwell’s method became commonplace in the aircraft design community.

The other case studies reinforce the centrality of Barnwell’s methodology. In chapter four, Anderson follows Arthur Raymond and the creation of the DC-3 during the first “design revolution” in aviation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The author emphasizes that Raymond used the same intellectual methodology of design, despite new advancements in streamlining, engines, and construction. This line of argument, however, is stretched in the subsequent chapters discussing R. J. Mitchell’s work on the Spitfire, Edgar Schmued on the P-51 Mustang, and Kelly Johnson with the “Skunk Works.” The book would have benefited from further analysis of these radical new technologies and the eccentricities of these designers. While Anderson focuses on the similarities of their methods, he also draws interesting distinctions in their uses of wind tunnel data, aerodynamic theory, and aesthetic taste for shaping their design. These details dispel any notion that educational background or familiarity with scientific theory were the sole determinants of success in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Grand Designers is intended for both nontechnical and technical audiences and indeed succeeds in being accessible for newcomers to aviation history and compelling for technical readers. Anderson excels when explaining complex processes of design, aerodynamic theory, and experimental testing. The many images accompanying the text bring extra clarity to what might have been an abstruse subject.

Anderson’s secondary arguments about education and the relevance of scientific experimentation and theory to these grand designers’ processes deserve more emphasis. Furthermore, extensive footnoting would have helped to separate technical information from the overall narrative of each chapter. The Grand Designers is an...