1939—Continued
May 5: Kilner-Lindbergh Board was established by Gen. H. H. Arnold to revise military characteristics of all U.S. military aircraft, including the B-29 design in the AAF 5-year program. The Board was composed of Gen. W. C. Kilner, Charles A. Lindbergh, Cols. Carl Spaatz and Naiden, and Major Lyon.
May 15: Navy issued contract to Curtiss Wright for the SXB2C-1 dive bomber, which despite prolonged operational development became the principal carrier dive bomber in the last year of World War II known as the Helldiver.
During June: First transatlantic passenger service, by Pan American Airways with a Boeing four-engined Yankee Clipper.
July 1: National Academy of Sciences sponsored a $10,000 research program at Cal Tech Rocket Research Project for the development of rockets suitable to assist Air Corps planes in takeoffs, the first U.S. rocket program.
During Summer: Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner interested President Roosevelt, through Alexander Sachs, in the potential military importance of uranium. The President appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium under the chairmanship of Dr. Lyman Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards.
: Total complement of NACA was 523 persons, of which only 278 were classified as technical personnel.
August 9: Congress authorized construction of the second NACA research station at Moffett Field, Calif., which became the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, named after Joseph S. Ames, president emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, member of the NACA from its beginning in 1915 to 1939, and Chairman of NACA from 1927 until 1939.
August 24: Assignment of Navy medical officer to BuAer was approved for the purpose of establishing an Aviation Medical Research Unit.
August 27: First complete flights of jet-propelled aircraft made secretly in Germany, a Heinkel 178 powered by the He S-3B jet engine, piloted by Erich Warsitz.
September 1: German blitzkrieg launched on Poland. President Roosevelt appealed to the European nations not to bomb civilian populations or unfortified cities.
September 3-4: RAF Bomber Command carried out the first night propaganda raid, dropping leaflets over Hamburg, Bremen, and the Ruhr. On September 27, the British Air Ministry announced that the RAF had dropped 18 million leaflets over Germany since the beginning of the war. When leaflet bombing was suspended on April 6, 1940, Bomber Command had dropped 65 million leaflets.
During September: Igor I. Sikorsky made initial flights with the first successful single-main-rotor helicopter, precursor of the R-4 two-place design procured in 1942 by the AAF.
: World's largest balloon, the Star of Poland, was unable to make stratospheric flight because of the German invasion. The United States had provided helium gas in August for this Polish effort and several American experts, including A. W. Stevens, provided technical assistance.
October 14: Naval Aircraft Factory authorized to develop radio-control equipment for use in remote-controlled flight testing of aircraft without risking the life of a test pilot.
October 19: Dr. Vannevar Bush was elected Chairman of the NACA to fill the post of Dr. Joseph Ames, who resigned due to ill health.
: Second Special Committee on "Future Research Facilities of NACA," headed by Charles A. Lindbergh, recommended that a powerplant research center be established at once, a recommendation resulting in the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory at Cleveland, Ohio, now the Lewis Research Center.
During October: Germans successfully fired and recovered A-5 development rockets with gyroscopic controls and parachutes, attaining an altitude of 7½ miles and a range of 11 miles.
November 20: Navy established its own School of Aviation Medicine at Pensacola, Fla., having previously detailed officers to the Air Corps School of Aviation Medicine.
November 30: U.S.S.R. invaded Finland, with Soviet planes bombing Helsinki and other Finnish towns.
December 2: Army Air Corps authorized to begin development of a four-engine bomber with a 2,000-mile radius of action, which led to the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.
December 29: Consolidated-Vultee B-24 Liberator made its first flight at San Diego.
During 1939: P-1 with R-1830 engine was provided by NACA's Pinkel, Turner, and Voss with separate stacks for each cylinder, thus providing 14 jet exhausts which increased the speed of aircraft from 13 to 18 mph between 10,000 and 20,000 feet. Applied to A-20 later, an increase of 45 mph was attained.
: Curtiss P-40 fighter powered with Allison V-1710-33, with a top speed of 357 mph, first ordered in quantity.
During 1939: Basic concepts for NACA's combined loads testing machine were proposed by E. E. Lundquist and J. N. Kotanchik of Langley Laboratory. After refinements by others, construction was started in 1940 and much testing performed before the completion and operation of the fixed-component machine in 1949. The combined loads testing machine was the first capable of applying positive and negative forces along each of three axes, and positive and negative moments about these axes, in any combination of forces and moments, each applied independently. Still in use in 1960, this machine was used extensively on combined loads and moments on shell-type structures for all types of flight vehicles.
During 1939-40: Original design of North American B-25 Mitchell bomber required 200,000 engineering man-hours; later wartime modification of this airplane (9,800 completed by the end of 1945) accounted for a total of more than 4,830,000 engineering man-hours.
1940
January 19: Maj. James H. Doolittle elected president of the IAS.
February 1: Capt. G. E. Price flew Bell Airacobra through flight tests.
February 24: BuAer issued a contract for airborne television equipment capable for use in transmitting instrument readings obtained from radio-controlled flight tests, and for providing target and guidance data should radio-controlled aircraft be converted to guided missiles.
February 21: Based upon the research of former NACA engineer, Charles H. Zimmerman, Navy initiated development of the Flying Flapjack with the award of a contract to Vought-Sikorsky for the design of the VS-173. The design promised high speed with low takeoff speed.
February 29: Navy BuAer initiated steps that led to a contract with H. O. Croft, State University of Iowa, to investigate the possibilities of a turbojet propulsion unit for aircraft.
March 9: Beechcraft AD-17 biplane flown to an altitude of 21,050 feet over the Antarctic to measure cosmic rays for the U.S. Antarctic Expedition, piloted by T. Sgt. T. A. Petras (USMC).
March 16: First civilian casualties in Britain due to air raids, during Luftwaffe attack on Scapa Flow.
March 22: Naval Aircraft Factory established a project for adapting radio controls to a torpedo-carrying TG-2 airplane.
March 26: U.S. commercial airlines completed a full year without a fatal accident or serious injury to a passenger or crew member.
During April: British commission gave North American Aircraft 120 days to produce a fighter prototype to specifications, which resulted in the highly successful P-51 Mustang, the first aircraft to utilize the NACA low-drag wing based on prolongation of laminar flow. Low-turbulence wind tunnel tests (completed in
