Richard Shevell; Engineer Led Design of DC-10 Jet

Richard Shevell, 79, a aeronautics and astronautics professor emeritus at Stanford University who was also known for his role in designing the DC-10 aircraft for Douglas Aircraft in the late 1960s. A native of New York, Shevell loved airplanes as a boy, making numerous sketches of them in a second-grade schoolbook. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, a master’s in aeronautical engineering and a professional aeronautic engineer degree from Caltech in the early 1940s. He joined Douglas Aircraft in 1942 working on the aerodynamics of missile guidance systems. In 1959, he was appointed head of the aerodynamic section of Douglas, in charge of the development of the DC-9 and several other DC planes. In 1967, he was made director of the commercial advanced design department, charged with the development of the DC-10 aircraft. The first flight of the DC-10 took place in the summer of 1970, about the same time that Shevell joined Stanford as visiting professor of aeronautics. At Stanford, he was an adjunct professor teaching courses in aircraft systems design and transportation analysis. He also taught introductory courses in aeronautics and astronautics and an ethics course on the role of the engineer in modern society. Among his many contributions to aeronautics was the invention of small devices called vortilions, which improve the way aircraft behave at low speed by changing the flow of air over the wing. In 1983, he wrote the textbook “Fundamentals of Flight,” which is still used at Stanford and throughout the world. On April 21 at his home in Atherton, of lymphoma.