National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
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Search complete. 24 mentions across 14 episodes found for "National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics".
Oct 2, 2026
Tail DraggerHOST
A high-wing monoplane built from molded plywood and a monocoque fuselage, meaning the skin itself carried the structural load.
Tail DraggerHOST
Big round cowling, a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics cowling over the Pratt & Whitney Wasp that cleaned up the airflow and added twenty or thirty miles per hour over an uncowled installation.
Tail DraggerHOST
In cruise, the Vega would push past two hundred miles per hour.
Tail DraggerHOST
That was fast.
Damon BruceHOST
All right.
Damon BruceHOST
Today in 1958, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics said, let's clean that up a little bit.
Damon BruceHOST
They became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the NACA became NASA.
Damon BruceHOST
There you go.
Tail DraggerHOST
The controls went progressively heavy, and the higher they pushed it, the worse it got.
Tail DraggerHOST
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NACA, which would later become NASA, had a team at Muroc watching the data.
Tail DraggerHOST
The engineers were concerned, not panicked, but concerned.
Tail DraggerHOST
There was a real question about whether the controls would remain effective through Mach 1.
Tail DraggerHOST
But the story does not end there, and this is the part worth sitting with.
Tail DraggerHOST
When the engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and at American Aircraft Manufacturers were designing the next generation of fighters in the late 1930s, the data from the Thompson Trophy racers was on the table.
Tail DraggerHOST
The streamlined fuselages, the powerful radial engines packed tightly behind carefully shaped cowlings to kill parasitic drag, the small efficient wing plan forms built for high-speed performance.
Tail DraggerHOST
The Granville Brothers had been running empirical aerodynamic research on every race day without calling it that, and the knowledge they generated, bought at a price that should make you pause, fed into the design language of American military aviation.
Tail DraggerHOST
Check them out at AviationSoul.com. Before we go any further into that October morning, you need to understand what the X1 actually was, because it was unlike anything that had existed in aviation before it.
Tail DraggerHOST
Bell Aircraft Corporation had built the X-1 under contract to the Army Air Forces and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which most people called NACA.
Tail DraggerHOST
NACA was the government research agency that predated what we now call NASA, and it had been studying the transonic problem seriously since the early 1940s.
Tail DraggerHOST
When aircraft in high-speed dive started experiencing violent shaking, control reversal, and in some cases never pulling out, the engineers knew they had a serious problem on their hands that existing theory couldn't fully explain.
Neville JamesHOST
I got that one right where Coolidge was the president at the time.
Neville JamesHOST
Right? And then President Herbert Hoover appointed him to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1929.
Neville JamesHOST
So I got that one right too.
Neville JamesHOST
But I want to make sure that the Hardin part from about 20 to 26, I believe it was, right,
Will ReitzHOST
Okay, let's talk about the birth of NASA.
Will ReitzHOST
Before it was called NASA, the United States Space and Aeronautics Agency was called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, N-A-C-A.
Will ReitzHOST
I don't know if it was called a NACA, but that's what it looks like on the page.
Will ReitzHOST
Here's some facts about the NACA.
Will ReitzHOST
It was founded in 1915 by the U.S. Congress.
Will ReitzHOST
Its original purpose was to direct, supervise, and conduct scientific study and research into the problems of flight.
Will ReitzHOST
So 1915, this is only just a few years after, about a decade after the Wright brothers, and the flight industry is becoming a thing.
Will ReitzHOST
For over 43 years, NACA built world-class research laboratories and advanced American commercial and military aviation.
Chris RamsayHOST
Under the terms of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of July 29, 1958, NASA was to be the official government agency charged with space exploration.
Chris RamsayHOST
And since they had fully absorbed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA, they already had a 46-year history of space research that could certainly help to expedite the program planning and preparations.
Chris RamsayHOST
But the NASA charter specified that it remained non-military.
Chris RamsayHOST
NASA could not be involved in a DIA program.
Chris GravelineHOST
I may vomit.
Chris GravelineHOST
In 1958, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, was replaced by NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which had been formed earlier that year.
Chris GravelineHOST
When NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA, it had 8,000 employees and an annual budget of $100 million.
Chris GravelineHOST
Today, NASA has more than 17,000 employees and operates with a budget of more than $25 billion.
Tail DraggerHOST
They study every combat report coming out of Europe.
Tail DraggerHOST
They borrow the laminar flow wing that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, had been developing in wind tunnels.
Tail DraggerHOST
A laminar flow wing delays the point where the air separates from the surface, less drag at high speed.
Tail DraggerHOST
a genuinely new idea being put directly into production.
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