The Science of Flight

©2019 by John LaTorre

In 1957, the Russians sent a satellite into orbit, a feat that was beyond the capabilities of the United States at the time. This event sent shock waves through the American educational system. It may also, in some small way, have set the course of much of my life.

You see, one of the things that came out of this shock wave was a re-evaluation of the way science was taught in schools. The government declared that if we wanted to catch up to the Russians in the "Space Race," there had to be a greater emphasis in training students for a future in aerospace, at as early a level as they could absorb. It was with this grand intention that the government sent out educators to spark interest in aerodynamics.

My fourth-grade class was one of the beneficiaries of this new emphasis on aviation science. This would have been in the spring of 1958, before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been set up, but already the government was taking steps to put the educational program into effect. Some students in my class, myself included, received some special training in the form of two energetic men who evangelized the glories of aviation. The name of the program was "The Science of Flight" and was introduced, I am sure, not only in my elementary school but in hundreds, maybe thousands, of other elementary schools around the country.

Up to that point, my experience in the subject amounted to a few rides in the DC-3 passenger planes that Allegheny Airlines flew between Syracuse and Washington, D.C., a cross-ocean flight in something like a Pan Am  DC-6B, and the construction of numerous plastic models of rockets and space ships being offered at the time by Revell, Monogram, and Aurora. How that experience amounted to a résumé that qualified me for the class is more than I can explain, but there I was, watching the energetic men displaying models just like the ones I was building, along with model airplanes and cross-sections of airplane wings.

The two men handed out paper fresh from the mimeograph machine, still fragrant from the alcoholic ink. Crude purple line diagrams, looking as though they'd been sketched out only moments before the class began, indicated the form of an airplane's wings, with all the forces acting upon it: the upward arrow of lift, the downward arrow of gravity, the forward arrow of thrust, the backward arrow of drag. And I recall other fragrant pages with pictures of rockets on them, showing how all the stuff pouring out of the rear ends of these rockets created forward propulsion, even in the vacuum of space. But that's all I really remember about the class, apart from the fact that my ten-year-old mind kept drifting to the spring weather outside and how it could be put to better uses than sitting in a classroom.

But seeds were sown then. Years later, as I forsook a civil service career for a job as an instructor in the nascent hang gliding industry, I found myself teaching those principles of aerodynamics to my first-day students. Those old pictures came back to mind in the form of explanations of why hang gliders worked. There was no vector of thrust, of course, but there were my old friends drag and gravity and lift, still up to their old tricks. Gliding flight was simply a matter of transmuting the forces of gravity and lift into forward motion, all the while attempting to reduce drag to a minimum. It was all very clear to me.

Of course, it took many and many a flight on small hills and dunes before I could grant a hang glider the trust to bear my weight, so that I could launch one without a moment's doubt that it would obey those immutable laws of physics. And it would take longer to realize that, on a high, windswept cliff, I would be more comfortable strapped into a glider than merely standing on the precipice. But I submit that I would never have even taken up the sport if I hadn't been convinced that those laws of physics could be depended on.

Even later, when I started test flying prototypes and production models, that confidence never wavered, although I realized that this particular glider, on this particular day, might get it into its head to kill me if I allowed it to. It's not that the glider ignored the laws of aerodynamics, but that through a designer's misunderstanding of those laws or a flaw in the manufacturing process, it would apply its form to an unexpected interpretation of those laws, and it would be up to me to sense it and do what I needed to do to make those laws work for me and not for it.

As glider design progressed, designers would be looking for ways to increase lift and decrease drag with every trick they could think of, taking airfoil design and streamlining to lengths I could scarcely imagine when I took up the sport. These gliders conformed to exactly the same laws that the earliest, crudest ones did, but it was a deeper appreciation and a cleverer application of those laws that allowed us to use them to our advantage.

I haven't the slightest idea whether "The Science of Flight" inspired the number of would-be aeronautical engineers that it intended to, and whether it actually made a difference in the "Space Race" or beyond. But I have to give it credit for introducing the basics of aviation to me, so that flight would be not a mystery but a part of a rational, scientific world, where lift, like gravity, could taken on faith. It was with that same confidence in the laws, and the same trust in technology, that humans would fly higher and faster, and eventually land on the moon's surface itself. What seemed a miraculous leap in technology was really no miracle at all. Perhaps the real miracle happened long ago, when someone realized that our world operated on rational, scientific principles, and that once we figured those out, we could harness our imagination to the natural world, and see how far it would take us.