Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (August 26, 1886 – September 10, 1984) was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S.

His WW2 chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was notable for favouring the development of existing aircraft designs rather than experimenting with turbojets or missile technology.

Walter Hunsaker descended from Swiss Anabaptists who had immigrated to Philadelphia in the 1730s and moved progressively west in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Walter Hunsaker worked as a newspaper editor in Detroit, where Jerome attended public schools until 1902 when the family moved to Saginaw, Michigan, a booming industrial city on Lake Huron.

Like his classmates, he found the Academy in a state of physical and academic transition, with new accommodations in the massive Bancroft Hall and a curriculum heavy in mathematics, science, and engineering, reflecting the emergence of the burgeoning American navy of steam and steel.

The school yearbook Lucky Bag noted his strong sense of humor and that he “loves an argument,”where he “generally proves he’s right.”[2] A year of sea duty as a passed midshipman followed graduation, during which as a division officer he was instrumental in improving the gunnery of the six-inch-gun cruiser California.

During his tour, Hunsaker was elevated in 1910 to lieutenant, junior grade, and the following year married Alice Porter Avery, an art student from Connecticut.

Hunsaker received a master of science degree in 1912, having written his thesis on the twisting moments of the rudder of a ship moving at high speeds, subsequently published in the Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

Assigned to temporary duty by the Navy, Hunsaker, along with Albert F. Zahm, a pioneering aeronautical engineer, Hunsaker toured British, French, and German aerodynamic research facilities, spending time with Eiffel in his laboratory outside Paris, and working with Ludwig Prandtl at the University of Gottingen, as well as with researchers at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington in England.

His superior as bureau chief was Rear Adm. David W. Taylor, a specialist in hydrodynamics, who gave now Lieutenant Hunsaker responsibilities for aircraft design, specifications, procurement, and inspection.

George C. Westervelt, Hunsaker collaborated with the Curtiss Engineering Corporation in the design and construction of a four-engine flying boat capable of spanning the Atlantic.

Promoted to lieutenant commander in 1918, Hunsaker traveled to Europe following the Armistice in November to gather information on British, French, Italian and German wartime aeronautical developments.

While serving in Europe, Hunsaker gauged that the “airplane and engine have reached a commercial degree of reliability, but that the technique of operation needs development.” He therefore decided to resign from the Navy and join Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York as a vice president in charge of aeronautical research.

Goodyear-Zeppelin was a collaboration between Goodyear Tire and Rubber and the German Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company to share rigid airship patents and technology.

Hunsaker believed Goodyear-Zeppelin could succeed in making the large rigid airship, with its payload capacity and long range, the foundation of a profitable transoceanic commercial air service.

The Daniel Guggenheim Airship Institute in Akron, Ohio, opened in 1932, was the result of Hunsaker’s idea for a place where “a few advanced thinkers might be put to work with benefit to the art” of lighter-than-air technology.

[4] In the spring of 1933, as Congress weighed a major bill to subsidize international airship routes, the Akron went down in storm off the New Jersey coast, killing 74, among them BuAer Chief William Moffett.

MIT’s president, Karl T. Compton and Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering, admired Hunsaker for his research and administrative experience and believed he could attract young faculty with specialties in thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and materials.

He was instrumental in acquiring funds for the Wright Brothers Memorial Wind Tunnel, dedicated in September 1938, and creating the new Department of Aeronautical Engineering in 1939.

It was independent (established 1915), functioning literally as a committee charged with identifying areas of research, setting broad policy guidelines, and acting as an intermediary between the government and private industry and universities.

He liked the German model, where generations of students working under a gifted professor such as Ludwig Prandtl in Gottingen, had been productive in basic aerodynamic research.

Hunsaker’s book, Aeronautics at the Mid-Century, published in 1952, surveyed advances in aerodynamics propulsion systems, and the evolution of air travel since the turn of the century.

Hunsaker lived on in declining health, but enjoying Agatha Christie novels, until his death at his home in Boston’s Beacon Hill on September 10, 1984, at the age of 98.