Robert Thomas Jones (engineer)

Robert T. (Bob) Jones, (May 28, 1910 – August 11, 1999), was an aerodynamicist and aeronautical engineer for NACA and later NASA. He was known at NASA as "one of the premier aeronautical engineers of the twentieth century".

One of Jones' first jobs was with the Nicholas-Beazley Airplane Company. Jones developed the Pobjoy Special air racer prior to the company shutting down in the depression.

Jones was a researcher at NACA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. As a self-trained aerodynamicist and mathematician, he had built up a national, if not international, reputation through his perceptive and original work at Langley. For this work he was given the IAS Sylvanus Albert Reed Award in 1946. Jones spent much of his time at Langley working in the Stability Research Division, which pioneered many concepts that were incorporated into U.S. aircraft.

In January 1945, Jones developed a theory of the delta wing, based on thin-airfoil theory. Others at Langley were extremely skeptical until supersonic testing of models was done by Robert Gilruth and in April by Theodore von Karman. His theory was not truly accepted until that summer, when Von Karman's team of investigators found that German experts had been working on swept-wing designs for several years. Jones thin-wing design ultimately proved superior to thick airfoils developed by Alexander Lippisch in Germany.

In August 1946, Jones transferred to Ames. The genius of Bob Jones seemed, in part, to lie in his remarkable ability to extract the essence of a problem and express it in understandable and useful terms. His approach to problems was always of a fundamental character and often yielded results of broad significance. In addition, Jones' wife Doris, an accomplished mathematician, also joined the Ames staff.

Later, still at Ames, Jones promoted the idea of an oblique wing. (The first known oblique wing design was Blohm & Voss P202, proposed by Richard Vogt in 1942.) His wind tunnel studies indicated that such a wing design on a supersonic transport might achieve twice the fuel economy of an aircraft with conventional wings. The concept was flight tested successfully on the NASA AD-1. This unique plane had a wing which pivoted about the fuselage, remaining perpendicular to it during slow flight and rotating to angles of up to 60 degrees as aircraft speed increased. Analytical and wind tunnel studies that Jones conducted at Ames indicated that a transport-sized oblique-wing aircraft flying at speeds of up to Mach 1.4 (1.4 times the speed of sound) would have substantially better aerodynamic performance than aircraft with conventional wings. A current DARPA project that has been awarded to Northrop Grumman, called the Switchblade is being developed to provide a more efficient UAV for the Air Force.

• 1946 Sylvanus Albert Reed Award (Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences)
• 1955 Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• 1971 Honorary PhD-Science, University of Colorado
• 1973 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1973 Member, National Academy of Engineering
• 1975 W. Rupert Turnbull Lecture, Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute
• 1978 Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Luft- und Raumfahrt
• 1979 Honorary Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• 1981 Langley Gold Medal, Smithsonian Institution
• 1986 Fluid Dynamics Prize, (American Physical Society)
• 1990 NAS Award in Aeronautical Engineering from the National Academy of Sciences
• 1998 NASA Superstars of Modern Aeronautics

• "J. C. Hunsaker Award in Aeronautical Engineering". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 14 February 2011.