Re: White Elephant (was Re: Naming 'the stick')



William Mook wrote:

Lets not confuse oblique with swept wing now.



They say that he invented the swept wing in 1944; that isn't the case. Buseman had come up with it in 1935; Jones did his in 1944, but who's saying he didn't see Buseman's papers on swept wings at some point? Blohm and Voss had the scissors wing on their P.202 in 1944, Thomas Jones didn't start playing around with one in a wind tunnel till 1946: http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/rjones.pdf after the flood of captured German aircraft research during W.W. II fell into our hands.
Jones did come up with the "Area Rule" and certainly deserves a great deal of credit for that.
What torques me is how the NASA PAO improves on history. Remember the "revolutionary" X-29 forward swept wing test aircraft?: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/x-29-EC87-0182.jpg
Here's the Junkers Ju-287 of W.W. II:
http://www.aeronautics.ru/archive/wwii/books/germany_secret_weapons_wwii/ju_287_02.jpg
Here's Deep Space 1 with its "revolutionary" ion engine ("Just like the one mentioned in Star Trek!" the PAO was happy to inform us.): http://www.entechsolar.com/ds1borrelly.jpg
A real ground-breaker that- unfortunately, if NASA checks its records it will find that it launched a ion engined spacecraft clean back in 1970: http://space.skyrocket.de/index_frame.htm?http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/sert-2.htm

Pat
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