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COLLOQUIUM MARCH 7
Researcher to Discuss Making Runways Safer
Slick runway conditions caused by
bad weather have contributed to as many as three dozen airplane
accidents in the last 20 years. Most of those accidents involved
fatalities, including one last June in Little Rock, Ark., that
killed 11 people and injured 89 others.
Engineers at the NASA Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Va., have studied runway friction for 40 years
to help industry develop better pavement and aircraft tires to
prevent airplane incidents. One of them, Thomas J. Yager, has
become an international expert on runway traction as a result of
his 37-year career at Langley.
 Yager is the NASA program manager
of the Joint NASA/Transport Canada/FAA Winter Runway Friction
Measurement Program. He has traveled all over the world conducting
runway tests and sharing his findings with other researchers.
Now Yager will share some of his ground
breaking work in safety with the Hampton Roads community. On
Tuesday, March 7 he will present "Slippin' and a-Slidin:' A
Researcher's Dilemma" at a colloquium at 2 p.m. at NASA Langley's
H.J.E. Reid Conference Center.
A media briefing will be held before
the presentation at 1:15 p.m. in the Wythe Room of the H.J.E. Reid
Conference Center, 14 Langley Blvd. at NASA Langley. Media who wish
to attend should contact Kathy Barnstorff at (757) 864-9886. Video
and still photographs of some of Yager's snowy runway tests will be
available.
Yager is a senior research engineer in
the Structural Dynamics Branch at NASA Langley. He started work at
the Hampton facility in June, 1963 after earning an engineering
science degree from the University of Portland in Portland,
Ore.
The public is invited to the Sigma
Series lecture at the Virginia Air and Space Center that evening at
7:30 p.m.
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