Former UA professor receives aviation award

Katherine K. Gardiner Arizona Daily Wildcat William Sears, UA professor emeritus of aerospace and mechanical engineering, shows the Guggenheim Medal he received for his contributions to the aviation industry.

"It's gratifying to know I was chosen for an honor by my own peers," said William Sears, professor emeritus of aerospace and mechanical engineering who retired from the UA in 1990.

The award is sponsored by three engineering professional societies - the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Society of Automotive Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The award was established in 1929 to recogni ze notable achievements in the advancement of aeronautics.

Sears said some of the previous recipients are scientists he has studied under or known. Other recipients include Orville Wright (1929), William Boeing (1934), and Charles Lindberg (1953).

Sears' contributions to the field of aeronautics at the University of Arizona came from research focused on the general field of "unsteady aerodynamics."

This includes processes such as gust entry, maneuvers and other unsteady situations.

He was interested in a concept called the "adaptable wind tunnel."

Sears said the walls in a wind tunnel do not satisfy the proper conditions during flight, because in a real flight experience, walls would not exist. He designed the adaptable wind tunnel to theoretically eliminate the effects of the walls with computers.

Sears said he became interested in aviation in junior high.

"I had teachers that said I should follow a career in engineering," he said.

Sears entered the newly started aeronautical engineering program at the University of Minnesota in 1930 for his bachelor of science degree.

His graduate research focused on the aerodynamics of unsteady processes and he obtained a Ph.D. in aerodynamics from the California Institute of Technology.

Sears then worked for Northrop Aircraft as the chief of aerodynamics and head of flight testing.

"My big job was the P-61 Black Widow Fighter," he said.

"The British Isles were taking a terrible beating from the night bombing," he said. "The military wanted a heavily armed night fighter equipped with the latest radar."

After the night fighter went into production, Sears' responsibility switched to developing the "flying wing" bomber. Northrop had been contracted to develop the "flying wing" bomber, which the Stealth Bomber's design was largely based on.

Sears left Northrop shortly after the end of World War II.

"I decided I wanted to go back into teaching," he said.

Sears became the director and founder of the Graduate School of Aeronautical Engineering at Cornell University in 1946. He left to come to the UA in 1974.

Sears said as he looks back over his past accomplishments, he realizes there are two types of engineering research. One involves a finished product.

The other involves a more general application which reduces the newest concepts to a practical use. Sears said it is the latter that he remembers with the greatest pleasure.

"It's the kind of thing that when you tell somebody about it, he's likely to be unimpressed, because it didn't come out in a piece of hardware," Sears said.

"Other people would be proud of the actual product," he added. "My personal satisfaction seems to be the one that involves the understanding, clarification and theory behind the process."

Sears said the field of engineering always involves optimization.

"It's important for engineering students to understand every engineering job is a job of optimization," he said.

"It's to accomplish the function in the most economical, safest and practical way."