Tunnels for Speed

Airmen firmly believe that this timetable, representing a cross-continent flight in the three-hour time difference between the coasts, will eventually be fact. But before it is, aeronautical engineers must learn much more than they now know about how air--and airplanes--behave at speeds up to and greater than the speed of sound (740 m.p.h.). The completion of three new laboratories for this study--three new $2,000,000-plus wind tunnels --was announced last week.

Two of the tunnels, designed to discover how fast and high a plane can go before it burns up, falls apart or bursts, are at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and at the Curtiss-Wright plant in Buffalo, N.Y. Cal Tech proudly calls its tunnel, financed by four California planemakers, the world's most advanced. It will test all-metal models with 8-to-10-ft. wing spans, at air speeds up to 750 m.p.h., generated by two giant aluminum fans.

The third tunnel is the Army Ordnance's, in the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.; it will be used to study bombs, shells and rockets. Air is compressed into a 32-ft. steel sphere, then released through a nozzle at air speeds up to 3,000 m.p.h. into a one-foot test chamber. Here small but exact brass models are connected to instruments which measure their lift in the air stream, their drag (resistance to air flow) and their stability (tendency to yaw or tumble). High-speed photographs of their action and of the air flow are taken through thick glass ports.

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