FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
NACA cowling on a Curtis AT-5A at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, October 1928
The NACA cowling is a type of aerodynamic fairing used to streamlineradial engines for use on airplanes. Developed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1927, it was a major advancement in drag reduction, and paid for its development and installation costs many times over due to the gains in fuel economy that it enabled. Image File history File links NACA-cowling-Curtiss-AT-5A.jpg NACA Cowling on a Curtiss AT-5A at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, October 1928. ... Aerodynamics is a branch of fluid dynamics concerned with the study of gas flows, first analysed by George Cayley in the 1800s. ... In fluid dynamics, a streamline is a line which is everywhere tangent to the velocity of the flow. ... Radial engine of a biplane. ... Fixed-wing aircraft is a term used to refer to what are more commonly known as aeroplanes in Commonwealth English (excluding Canada) or airplanes in North American English. ... NACA official seal The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was a U.S. federal agency founded on March 3, 1915 to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. ... 1927 (MCMXXVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... For a solid object moving through a fluid or gas, drag is the sum of all the aerodynamic or hydrodynamic forces in the direction of the external fluid flow. ... Fuel efficiency, sometimes also referred to as fuel economy and commonly gas mileage in the United States, is a numeric measure often used to describe the amount of fuel consumed with regard to the distance travelled in a transportation vehicle, such as an automobile. ...
The NACAcowling as applied to a Curtiss AT-5A at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, October 1928.
The idea for the NACA low-drag cowling originated in 1926 during a demonstration of the new Propeller Research Tunnel (PRT) at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (LMAL) in Virginia near the Atlantic coast.
Old NACA hands believed that their independence from political pressures was partly the reason that NACA was the premier aeronautical research institution in the world during the 1920s and 1930s.
NACA engineers tested 78 airfoil shapes in its wind tunnels and in 1933 issued Technical Report No. 460, "The Characteristics of 78 Related Airfoil Sections from Tests in the Variable-Density Wind Tunnel." The authors of this report described a four-digit scheme that defined and classified the shape of the airfoil.
The NACA also studied the problems of flight in the upper atmosphere and at hypersonic speeds, which would lead to the development of the rocket-propelled X-15 research airplane.
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