Robert Jones; Pioneered Jet Wing Designs
Robert Thomas Jones, whose design for the swept-back jet wing enabled planes to break the sound barrier, died Wednesday at his home in Los Altos Hills. He was 89.
The eminent aerodynamicist worked for 35 years as a scientist and researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Los Altos. During a long and distinguished career, Jones, who was known as “R.T.,” also invented the oblique wing, a radical design for a pivoting wing that he believed had vast potential for improving fuel economy and increasing airspeed. Although it never went beyond the testing stage, its possibilities continue to intrigue aeronautical designers.
“I have known two geniuses in my lifetime--R.T. in aeronautics and Edward Teller in defense,” said Jack Boyd, a former deputy director of the Ames Research Center and currently executive assistant to the director. “R.T. was a giant.”
A dreamer who loved airplanes and had a genius for design, Jones left the University of Missouri after a year to join a flying circus in 1928.
He later moved to Washington, where he audited courses at Catholic University taught by the German aerodynamicist Max Munk while holding a job as an elevator operator in the Capitol. His contact with influential lawmakers eventually led to a position at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia.
Toward the end of World War II, word reached the American aeronautical community that the Germans were testing theories for supersonic flight that involved sweeping aircraft wings aft. Jones was working on the same concept.
In 1945, he conducted airflow studies that found dramatic changes occurred around a high-speed plane as it thundered past Mach 1, the speed of sound. A plane traveling faster than the speed of sound created a cone-shaped shock wave that cut across the tips of straight wings and could batter the wings badly enough to cause them to deteriorate.
So Jones concluded that the wings should be swept back, which would save the wings and reduce drag.
His idea was ignored until wind-tunnel tests showed that wings with a 45-degree sweep have less than one-tenth the drag of straight wings. It was a defining moment in aeronautical history.
Today nearly every airplane that flies at supersonic speed has swept-back wings, from fighter planes and bombers to commercial jets and the space shuttle.
“Everybody who flies on an airplane these days benefits from R.T.’s thinking,” said Boyd, who knew Jones for more than 50 years. “You get less drag and very high efficiency. Astounding results from such a simple thought.”
Jones later turned his attention to a more radical wing concept which he called the oblique wing. Mounted on a pivot on top of the fuselage, the oblique wing could be turned back and forth by the pilot. On takeoff, the wing would stay at a right angle to the fuselage for maximum lift. But at cruising altitude it could be turned so that one tip points forward and the other backward. A plane with such an adaptive wing, Jones theorized, could save fuel, generate less engine noise and eliminate sonic boom.
As far back as 1945, Jones said, he and other aerodynamicists realized that the oblique wing could be better than the swept wing. “But none of us had the nerve to push it very hard,” he said in 1975, “because it was too radical.” Test flights on a NASA research plane in the late 1970s to early 1980s proved that it could work. But it looked so odd--like a flying scissors--that it went no further than that. But Jones never gave up on it, maintaining that it was a viable design for large transoceanic or transcontinental aircraft.
Jones, who never completed his college education, also was noted for his research in optics and biomechanics.
Because his major patents were assigned to NASA, he said he never profited from his revolutionary designs. In 1976, NASA awarded him $15,000 for “the totality of his scientific contribution to the conduct of NASA programs . . . and the advancement of scientific knowledge,” but the Internal Revenue Service forced him to pay taxes on it.
He is survived by his wife, Megan More of Los Altos; daughters Harriet Jones of Berkeley and Patricia Jones of San Diego; and sons David of Corinth, Miss., Edward of Murfreesboro, Tenn., and John of Los Altos.
