The Davis Wing and the Problem of Airfoil Design: Uncertainty and Growth in Engineering Knowledge

Abstract

Among the many important decisions confronting designers of an airplane is choice of shape for the fore-and-aft sections of the wing. During the 1930s most American designers made this choice from an extensive catalog of sections whose aerodynamic properties had been measured in the wind tunnels of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In 1938, however, one major company, the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego, chose for its B-24 bomber a somewhat mysterious section devised by a lone inventor named David R. Davis. The choice depended on some unusual test results, unexplained at the time, from the wind tunnel at the California Institute of Technology. The B-24 went on to become the most numerous and one of the most successful bombers of World War II. The Davis section, after its moment in the sun, disappeared quietly and with little effect on the evolution of wing design. This situation, curious at the time and largely forgotten today, is an interesting sidelight in the history of aeronautics. More important for scholarly concerns, it provides a useful vehicle for studying engineering knowledge in relation to design. This article is a companion to three earlier studies in which I examined various aspects of engineering knowledge in the contexts successively of experimental research, theoretical analysis, and production.' The intermediate activity of design figured in all of these, but