Department of

Aerospace Engineering


barney mccormick

McCormick, Barnes W., Jr. , Ph.D.

Boeing Professor Emeritus, Aerospace Engineering

231A Hammond Building

Penn State University

University Park, PA 16802

Phone: 814-863-0602 / Fax: 814-865-7092

E-mail:bwmaer@engr.psu.edu

 


When it comes to aerodynamics, Professor Barnes McCormick wrote the book. In fact, he wrote two, “Aerodynamics of V/STOL Flight” and “Aerodynamics, Aeronautics, and Flight Mechanics,” which has been called one of the most important teaching and reference tools in the field. On his lunch hours, he also found time to write an as yet unpublished novel.

Now the Boeing Professor Emeritus of aerospace engineering at Penn State, McCormick retired from day-to-day responsibilities in 1991 but still teaches two courses, Flight Testing, and Special Topics in Aerodynamics, serves on university and professional committees, consults, and directs the university’s Comprehensive Short Course in Rotary Wing Technology, which he founded in 1967.

Spend some time talking to McCormick about his life and career, and you come away with one overarching impression: This guy has had a lot of fun. It’s not only that he has met so many people, traveled to so many places, and played so many winning hands of cards, it’s also that he has relished the work itself.

To illustrate, consider the relationship of Barnes McCormick to the Kutta Zhukovsky Theorem. From 1988 until 1995, McCormick was U.S. coordinator for the fight mechanics panel of NATO’s research and technology organization. In that capacity, he was invited to visit the Russian city of Zhukovsky, a center of aviation named for Nikolai Zhukovsky, whose eponymous theorem describes the lift generated by the circulation of air around a wing.

McCormick loves that theorem – both its elegance and its utility. Demonstrating it for undergraduates, he concludes by saying, “Isn’t that neat?” The first time he saw the equation worked out for himself, he wanted to applaud.

That’s the math side of the story. On the social side, McCormick recalls the reception and dinner during the conference in the city of Zhukovsky. When his hosts urged tumblers of vodka on him, he hesitated but eventually decided it would be rude to decline. Soon thereafter, he felt emboldened to rise and offer a toast “to the brilliance of Zhukovsky in the city of Zhukovsky.”

His Russian colleagues were delighted.

Barnes McCormick was born in Georgia and grew up in Pennsylvania. He remembers building his first model airplanes, “not from a kit, from scratch,” at the age of seven, and he continued the hobby throughout adolescence. When he graduated high school in 1944, he enlisted in the Naval Air Corps, hoping for action, but with World War II winding down, he was too late for flight training. The Navy sent him to Bloomsburg College followed by Penn State and then discharged him in 1946. He then married Emily Hess, whom he had met at Bloomsburg, re-enrolled at Penn State, and earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, all in aeronautical engineering.

At that point, after many consecutive years in academia, he wanted some practical experience, so he went to work for Piasecki Corporation in Morton, Penn. Shortly after he joined the company, it was renamed the Vertol Aircraft Corporation.

“I was unhappy, though,” he said. “Essentially, I was doing the same thing I had been doing in school, solving equations in a corner. I wanted to leave, but the VP for engineering took me aside and said, ‘We like you. You can’t leave.’ Next thing you know, I was named chief of aerodynamics even though I had only taken one little dinky course in helicopters. I had to learn fast, and of course the other engineers in the group wanted to know, ‘Who is this young kid who is suddenly the boss?’”

It took time, but McCormick knew he had passed muster with his subordinates – “a good group of guys”-- when they invited him to play penny ante poker on Saturday nights. Meanwhile, he conducted the wind tunnel tests of the CH-46, forerunner of the Chinook, and began the process of establishing himself as an authority on V/STOL (vertical/short-takeoff and landing) technology.

In 1957, McCormick left Vertol (later acquired by Boeing), to head the department of aeronautical engineering at Wichita State University. While he liked the job and being in an aviation manufacturing center, his wife, Emily, was homesick. After a year, he returned to join the faculty at Penn State, and he and Emily were in State College to stay.

McCormick’s Penn State research has focused on low-speed aerodynamics in general, flight mechanics, the aerodynamics of vertical flight, marine and aviation propeller design, hydrodynamics, and aerodynamic noise. He has served as an associate editor for the AIAA's “Journal of Aircraft” and editor of the “Journal of the American Helicopter Society.”

Meanwhile, Emily taught at Radio Park Elementary and typed the manuscripts for McCormick’s master’s thesis and his doctoral dissertation. Together, they raised their daughter, Cindy, who now lives near Harrisburg. In 1969, McCormick became head of the department of aerospace engineering, a post he held until 1985 when he was named Penn State’s first Boeing Professor of Aerospace Engineering.

Among McCormick’s significant contributions to aviation was his investigation and analysis of the phenomenon then informally called “prop wash” and today called wake turbulence, in other words the vortex systems created by a moving wing. McCormick describes wake turbulence as “two horizontal tornadoes,” circular cores with winds swirling around them. The peril he characterizes like this: “If a plane penetrates the tornado, it crashes.”

For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that the size of the circular core was much larger than it actually is. Because the core size is inversely proportional to the speed at which the surrounding winds are spinning, that assumption led to the erroneous conclusion that the wind velocities were slower and hence less dangerous than they are. McCormick and his students accurately measured the velocity field and how fast it decays, instigating creation of the rules that today keep planes safer by ensuring they are kept an appropriate distance apart.

McCormick’s best-known contribution to Penn State aerospace is having put the department on the map when it comes to the helicopter. For example, in 1967, he founded the week-long short course on rotary craft that he continues to direct. It has been offered every year since its inception, making it the longest-lived of all Penn State conferences.

As for McCormick’s novel, it is a 382-page fictionalized account of one of dozens of accidents he has been retained to investigate, the crash of a twin turboprop into a hangar on approach to O’Hare in the fog. The accident was initially called pilot error, but the pilot’s widow refused to believe it. Working for the defense attorneys on behalf of the pilot’s estate, McCormick reconstructed the chain of events that led to the crash, determining that a third pilot, riding in the jumpseat, must have bumped a test button beside him, destabilizing the plane. With no way of knowing this, the pilot himself disengaged the autopilot, eventually causing the aircraft to stall. The widow, whom McCormick calls “a good kid,” was vindicated: The accident was not her late husband’s fault.

McCormick said when he tells current students that he worked out the computations needed to reconstruct that crash using nothing more sophisticated than a programmable calculator, they can’t believe it.

Today, McCormick not only keeps up his professional responsibilities but, along with Emily, volunteers in the State College community. During tax season, for example, he spends a night a week helping low-income senior citizens to prepare their returns. Emily McCormick is a frequent volunteer for Red Cross blood drives on campus, and Barnes maintains his office in the Hammond Building, so the two of them often walk the mile from their home to the university together, then catch the bus back.

Leisure? He does not know the meaning of the word. At age 83, he says, “I have a fear of sitting around and doing nothing.”

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