NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

He didn't tear up the prepared speech, a move that's a ritual for those who are supposedly speaking from the heart. Tearing up speeches is cliché, and NASA Administrator Mike Griffin wasn't about clichés Friday at the opening ceremonies of the final reunion of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

"It ought to be a non-negotiable entrance criterion to hold this job that if you can't prepare a speech about NACA's contributions to this nation and the world, if you can't prepare that speech off the top of your head, you're not qualified for this job," Griffin told a full house at the Reid Center.

"Which would be an interesting substitution for a Senate confirmation hearing," he added, drawing a laugh and applause from everybody and beginning a 27 ½-minute dissertation on those NACA contributions.

He began with the plane he flew down from Washington, a Grumman Tiger. It has "an NACA 64-415 airfoil modified with stall strips," Griffin said. Research had led him to an understanding that "almost all of the airfoils that go on almost all of the airplanes in the world trace their roots to NACA airfoil designs."

Griffin spoke of textbooks and special aircraft, and of people like Dick Whitcomb, a NACA Langley veteran and still a Hampton resident who formulated the "area rule" concerning fuselage shape in the early 1950s.

"The 'area rule' almost by itself makes supersonic flight, high-speed flight a reasonable and possible thing to do, rather than flogging the air into submission," Griffin said.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin talks with NACA reunion attendee Walter Nelson.
Credit: NASA/Sean Smith.

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He spoke of the P-38 and P-51 aircraft, for which NACA solved problems that kept them from flying safely.

Griffin referred only occasionally to notes prepared on hotel stationary as he recalled slotted wind tunnels and NACA research and tests on airplane stalls and spins. And the X-15, first flown under the flag of the 8-month-old NASA in 1959, but conceived and developed by NACA.

"An absolutely, fundamentally groundbreaking historic performance that has not yet been exceeded," he said of the aircraft that flew 199 times with a single fatality, achieving penetration of the threshold of space among its exploits.

Griffin talked of NACA's icons, of Hardy Allen and Arthur Eggers, of Max Faget, Caldwell Johnson and others in a rollcall of aeronautical pioneers, a few of whom were in the audience Friday. And he spoke of the Space Task Group that was formed from NACA scientists and engineers at Langley in 1958 and was the incubator of NASA's space exploration accomplishments.

"No group was more important to the formulation of our present-day agency than NACA," Griffin said, then added Langley's role as its "mother center."

Neil Armstrong, Griffin reminded, was a NACA pilot before becoming the first man on the moon.

"As Neil has told me, (NACA) was where the action was if you wanted to be an engineer and an engineering test pilot," Griffin said.

NACA still exists in the aeronautical research at Langley, Glenn, Ames and Dryden centers, he said. "These are places where if you want something done, if you want to see hands-on work, you can still see it and it's a joy for me to behold."

But times have changed since the days when NACA led the world in technology research. The nation's fiscal priorities have changed, Griffin said. "We live in a public policy environment today where those investments are not being made" in research and technology "which are and will be important to the United States and to our kids and grandkids and great grandkids.

"Things that will be important to them that aren't being done now, are being done in other places of the world. It causes me to worry about whether or not we will be the world's premier technical society in succeeding generations because work not done now can't be made up later."

The day was important to Griffin.

"(NACA's work) can't be summarized in any short speech," he said. "They aren't contributions to aviations and space, they ARE aviation and space as developed by this country and, therefore, the world."

And it was personal to him.

"Many of you, many of the people I've noted on these scraps of paper, are and remain personal heroes of mine," Griffin said. "Many of them are people who took the time to mentor me as a young engineer, and I'm grateful for it."

Before exiting the Reid Center, Griffin received a plaque from Duncan McIver, the reunion chairman. The inscription proclaimed NACA's relationship to NASA: "The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) alumni congratulates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on its 50th anniversary in 2008. NACA provided inspiration aeronautics and space leadership for the U.S. from 1915 to 1958, became the parent of NASA, and congratulates its progeny for a job extremely well done."

Before Griffin spoke, Air Force Col. Jeffrey Prichard, deputy commander of Langley Air Force Base's 1st Fighter Wing, also thanked the NACA personnel. "We dominate the world's air and space today because of the work you did," Prichard said.

He later hosted the NACA reunion attendees, showing them the F-22 Raptor, which incorporates so many of the developments that the organization fostered.

And Lesa Roe, Langley's center director, had a rollcall of her own, listing the five Collier trophies won by NACA personnel.

"The whole country owes you a debt of gratitude," she said. "I salute you."

It was the beginning of what will be a full weekend for the 358 people attending. A function later in the day at the Air and Space Center was scheduled to bring more accolades.

"This is a legacy," said Roe, standing outside the Reid Center while the reunion attendees boarded busses for the Langley tour.

She harkened to her own engineering background, saying "it makes us all want to be like them."

 
NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Adams