Summary

Chapter Six, War Birds, begins by talking about the Tuskegee airmen, who were closely followed in the black newspapers. Making sure the planes they flew performed well was the job of the people at the Langley laboratories, including Dorothy.

NACA’s discoveries were happening so quickly that an entry-level position was considered an excellent graduate school program. A course in engineering physics was created for the female computers in hopes of propelling them to junior engineer status. Dorothy attended the class.

Much of the research that took place at Langley took place in the wind tunnels. One of the concepts Dorothy had to learn was the Reynolds number, which determined how closely a wind tunnel came to actual flight. Langley was unsurpassed in the quality of its wind tunnel research data. The raw data from the research often passed Dorothy’s desk.

The...