Richard T. Whitcomb

Richard Travis Whitcomb ( born February 21 1921 in Evanston, Illinois, † October 13, 2009 in Newport News, Virginia) was an American aeronautical engineer.

Whitcomb grew up in Worcester and studied at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was an engineer at the Langley Research Center of NASA and its predecessor NACA. In 1991, he went into retirement.

He is especially known for the area rule of the form of aircraft at and near supersonic flight. It was found, however, already at least two engineers before ( including Otto Frenzl in Germany ). Whitcomb came out after studying the high air resistance by the generated shock waves near the sound barrier in wind tunnels and after a lecture by Adolf Busemann about the different type of behavior of the air near the sound barrier.

In the 1960s he developed supercritical airfoils to reduce the air resistance in flight transsonischem and in the 1970s he led winglets in the modern sense.

In 1973 he received the National Medal of Science, the 2000 NAS Award in Aeronautical Engineering and 1979, the Howard N. Potts Medal. As early as 1956, he received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, 1954, the Collier Trophy in 1955 and the USAF Exceptional Service Medal. In 2003, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering ( 1976).