Hugh L. Dryden's Career in Aviation and Space: NACA Aeronautics, X-15 Rocketplane, NASA Mercury Astronaut and Apollo Lunar Landing Program

This account of the life of Dr. Hugh Latimer Dryden describes his enormous contributions to aviation and space. Hugh Dryden was a research scientist of the highest order, an aeronautics pioneer, the Director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and then the first NASA Deputy Administrator. Dr. Hugh Dryden's special relationship to the Dryden Flight Research Center goes far beyond its name. Among Hugh Dryden's first actions after becoming the NACA's Director of Research in September 1947, was to inform Walt Williams, the director of the (light research operation here in the desert, that the NACA Muroc organization, formed the previous year, would now become a permanent facility known as the NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit.

Hugh Dryden strongly supported the flight research conducted here with the early rocket-powered aircraft. He represented the NACA on the interagency Research Airplane Committee that supervised the beginnings of the critically important X-15 research at the High Speed Flight Station.

As Dr. Gorn recounts, Hugh Dryden had begun work in the transonic region very early in his career, and in fact it was he who coined the word "transonic," because no such word existed to describe speeds at or near that of sound in the early 1920s. Much of the research conducted here at the Center has concerned transonic flight, so that is another link between Dryden the man and Dryden the Center.

Dr. Gorn also describes Hugh Dryden's work with the "crucial transition from laminar to turbulent flow," another very important aspect of flight research here at DFRC over the five decades of its existence. This work continues today in the research being done on the F 16XT. to examine Supersonic Laminar Flow Controla project that would have been dear to the heart of Hugh Dryden. Finally, Hugh Dryden wrote a description of flight research that has served ever since as the unofficial motto of the Center that bears his name and, in a very real sense, carries on his work. It separates, he stated, "the real from the imagined," and makes known the "overlooked and the unexpected." That brief line more effectively describes exactly what we do at the Dryden Flight Research Center than anything that has been written before or since.

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