Computing machines in aircraft engineering

Abstract

The author presents a user's critical view of computing machinery in aircraft engineering with emphasis on its limitations. He concludes that our engineering use of computing machinery has progressively increased in scope and magnitude during these past six years. At the beginning of that period we applied machine methods on a very modest scale. We did so in the hope that it would be the eventual means of breaking our major design bottleneck- the ever growing volume of mathematical investigation demanded by modern aircraft. Machine computing has been at least partially successful in accomplishing that purpose. The scale of our operations has grown naturally from its tentative beginnings to the point that machine computing is definitely indispensable now. It is becoming increasingly vital at a startling rate. Computing machines are themselves an engineering product. It is entirely likely that, in their ultimate development, the engineering profession itself will be the biggest user of that product.