To achieve reduced drag in the transonic phase, Whitcomb realized that the wing's pressure distribution must be modified to delay and weaken the shock wave created on the upper surface where the high-velocity flow decelerated to subsonic.

Using intuition rather than mathematics, he built a two-foot (0.6-meter) chord wing section and tested it repeatedly in the Langley high-speed wind tunnel, adding (with auto body putty) or removing (with a file and sandpaper) material until the desired flows were achieved.

Therefore, NASA signed a contract with the Courant Institute at New York University, whose mathematician Paul Garabedian and aerodynamicist Antony Jameson worked with Whitcomb to develop a practical computational method for designing supercritical[4] airfoils - those that were most efficient in the transonic range.

Using this method, supercritical wings were fabricated and proven on full-scale aircraft; in 1971 a Vought F-8 Crusader, and in 1973 a General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, were flown at the NASA Flight Research Center in California.

Following his research on wings, Whitcomb again turned to a possible complete supercritical aircraft, and in 1971 he published preliminary details of a near-sonic transport (NST), which he predicted could attain a relatively efficient cruise at 0.98 Mach.

As with his supercritical wing efforts, he had largely developed the design in the wind tunnel, shaping his proposed model with putty and knife until the various secondary shocks created by wing-body intersections were muted as much as possible.

Following his groundbreaking research on transonic airflow, Whitcomb spent several years moving in an entirely different field - the possible extraction of usable energy from the environment by employing possible avenues of quantum physics.