Adolf Busemann

Adolf Busemann (20 April 1901 – 3 November 1986) was a German-American aerospace engineer and influential Nazi-era pioneer in aerodynamics, specialising in supersonic airflows. He introduced the concept of swept wings and, after emigrating in 1947 to the United States under Operation Paperclip, invented the shockwave-free supersonic Busemann biplane.

Education and early life Born in Lübeck, Germany, Busemann attended the Technical University of Braunschweig, receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1924.

Career and research The next year he was given the position of aeronautical research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute where he joined the famed team led by Ludwig Prandtl, including Theodore von Kármán, Max Munk and Jakob Ackeret. In 1930 he was promoted to professor at University of Göttingen. He held various positions within the German scientific community during this period, and during the war he was the director of the Braunschweig Laboratory, a famous research establishment.

Busemann discovered the benefits of the swept wing for aircraft at high speeds, presenting a paper on the topic at the Fifth Volta Conference in Rome on October 3, 1935, the very day of Italian invasion of Ethiopia which caused a delay of his talk. The paper concerned only supersonic lift. At the time of his proposal, flight much beyond 300 miles per hour had not been achieved and it was considered an academic curiosity (in fact, Busemann was initially planning to present a talk on supersonic wind tunnels, but had to swap topics with Jakob Ackeret because of the "sensitive developments" for the Luftwaffe

At Langley, he worked primarily on the problems of sonic booms, and spent a considerable amount of effort looking at ways to characterize them, and potentially eliminate them. He later invented Busemann's Biplane, a supersonic design he originally proposed in 1936 that emits no shock waves and has no wave drag, albeit at the cost of having no lift. Busemann also did early work on magneto-hydrodynamics in the 1920s, as well as on cylindrical focusing of shock waves and non-steady gas dynamics.

Busemann held a professorship at the University of Colorado from 1963 and suggested the use of ceramic tiles on the Space Shuttle, which were adopted by NASA.

Awards and honors He was awarded the Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt (German Society for Aeronautics and Astronautics) for "outstanding contribution in the field of aerospace engineering" in 1966. He died at age 85 in Boulder, Colorado.