He Sparked Supersonic Flight With a Coke Bottle and File

Richard T. Whitcomb dreamed up techniques that made supersonic flight possible and innovations that endure on passenger jets today.

Mr. Whitcomb, who died Oct. 13 at age 88, solved a problem that had bedeviled aviation engineers, whose designs couldn't achieve supersonic flight even though they seemed to have enough power. Increased wind resistance at speeds approaching the speed of sound was the problem. Engineers took to calling it the "sound barrier."

Mr. Whitcomb's solution was to taper the airplane's fuselage in a manner he often likened to a Coke bottle, which dramatically reduced drag. Within three years of Mr. Whitcomb's discovery in 1951, U.S. Air Force interceptors were flying at supersonic speeds.

It was the first of three revolutionary advances Mr. Whitcomb designed. Another was a new and more efficient wing shape used today on nearly all passenger jets. And he designed "winglets" -- small drag-reducing vertical panels found at the wing-tips of many commercial jets.

"I think he was the most significant aeronautical engineer operating in the second half of 20th century," says Tom Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "His fingerprints are on every jet plane flying today."

Although he did much to define modern flight, Mr. Whitcomb never learned to fly.