Adolf Busemann was born on April 20, 1901, and died on November 3, 1986. He was a German engineer who worked in the field of aerodynamics during the Nazi era. Busemann focused on how air moves faster than the speed of sound. He developed the idea of using swept wings on airplanes, which helped improve their performance. In 1947, he moved to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. There, he created a special type of airplane called the Busemann biplane, which could fly at supersonic speeds without creating shockwaves.
Education and early life
Busemann was born in Lübeck, Germany. He attended the Technical University of Braunschweig and earned his Ph.D. in engineering in 1924.
Career and research
The following year, he became an aeronautical research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute, joining a well-known team led by Ludwig Prandtl, which included Theodore von Kármán, Max Munk, and Jakob Ackeret. In 1930, he was promoted to professor at the University of Göttingen. During this time, he held several roles in the German scientific community. During the war, he became the director of the Braunschweig Laboratory, a well-known research center.
Busemann discovered the advantages of swept wings for aircraft flying at high speeds. He presented a paper on this topic at the Fifth Volta Conference in Rome on October 3, 1935, the same day the Italian army invaded Ethiopia, which caused a delay in his talk. The paper focused only on supersonic lift. At the time, flying faster than 300 miles per hour had not yet been achieved, and the idea was considered an academic curiosity. Busemann had originally planned to speak about supersonic wind tunnels but had to change topics with Jakob Ackeret due to "sensitive developments" for the Luftwaffe. Despite this, he continued studying the concept and later showed similar benefits for the transonic region. After this, the research was classified. As director of the Braunschweig labs, he began testing the concept in wind tunnels and by 1942 had collected a large amount of useful technical data. As Germany needed faster aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me P.1101 was developed to test these designs.
At the end of World War II, a group of American aerodynamicists traveled to Germany as part of Operation Lusty. This team included Theodore von Kármán, Tsien Hsue-shen, Hugh Dryden, and George S. Schairer from Boeing. They arrived at the Braunschweig labs on May 7 and found a large collection of data about the swept wing concept. When they asked Busemann about it, "his face showed excitement," and he said, "Oh, you remember, I read a paper on it at the Volta Conference in 1935." Some members of the team remembered the presentation but had forgotten the details. Schairer immediately wrote to Boeing to investigate the concept, leading to changes in the design of the B-47 Stratojet to include a swept wing. Busemann’s work, along with similar research by Robert T. Jones in the United States, led to major changes in aircraft design.
Near the end of the war, Busemann began studying airflow around delta wings, leading to his development of the supersonic conical flow theory. This theory simplified the complexity of airflow to a conformal mapping in the complex plane and was used in the industry for some time.
In 1947, Busemann moved to the United States and began working at NACA’s Langley Research Center. In 1951, he gave a talk explaining that air near supersonic speeds no longer changed in diameter with speed according to Bernoulli’s theorem but remained mostly incompressible, acting like fixed-diameter pipes, or "streampipes," as he called them. He humorously suggested that aerodynamicists should become "pipe fitters." This talk inspired an attendee, Richard Whitcomb, to study the concept in a transonic test, leading to the invention of the Whitcomb area rule a few days later.
At Langley, he focused on problems related to sonic booms and worked to find ways to describe and possibly eliminate them. Later, he invented Busemann’s Biplane, a supersonic design he first proposed in 1936 that produces no shock waves or wave drag, though it cannot generate lift. Busemann also did early research on magneto-hydrodynamics in the 1920s, as well as on cylindrical focusing of shock waves and non-steady gas dynamics.
From 1963, Busemann held a professorship at the University of Colorado and suggested using ceramic tiles on the Space Shuttle, a design later adopted by NASA. In 1966, he was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering." He died at age 85 in Boulder, Colorado.