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Postgraduate Programs: 1919-1946

The history of the Air Force Institute of Technology may be traced to 1919, when Colonel Thurman H. Bane, Commanding Officer of McCook Field at Dayton, Ohio, formed an Air School of Application. In his request for authority to begin, he wrote, "No man can efficiently direct work about which he knows nothing." His argument was evidently convincing, as he was ordered to begin the instruction on Nov 10, 1919. Seven officers were enrolled in the first course. The task of organizing and running the new school fell on Lieutenant Edwin E. Aldrin holder of a MS from MIT and (later to become) the father of Col. "Buzz" Aldrin.

At that early date McCook Field was already a large experimental laboratory, with about 400 scientists, engineers and technicians engaged in many research and development projects. Between 1919 and 1922 Air Service engineers had designed and built 27 airplanes of all types. With this base of expertise, it is not surprising that most of the instruction in the new school was provided by engineering specialists assigned to the base. While not originally intended to produce engineers, by 1923 the yearlong course in General Aeronautical Engineering was primarily concerned with the design of aircraft and aircraft engines. Graduates of the Class of 1923 included aviation notables Lt. John Macready, (the only three time winner of the McKay trophy) and Lt. James H. Doolittle.

But changes in the role of the Air Service engineers were taking place. Spokesmen for the infant aircraft industry sought a larger role in aircraft development, seeking contracts for experimental airplanes. Consequently, the role of Air Service engineers changed from that of designing and building new aircraft to that of approving designs submitted to the Air Service, and to providing consultation to outside designers and manufacturers. In 1927 the school (by this time renamed the Air Corps Engineering School) was moved, along with engineering and test activities, to the 4500 acre tract of land donated to the government by the citizens of Dayton and designated as Wright Field.

The curriculum was revised to appeal to younger students, all graduates of West Point or civilian technical institutions. The program culminated with a course in performance and flight-testing, with the Commandant assigning an airplane design problem each year. After analyzing the tactical requirements, the students completed a preliminary design which including weight estimate and balance, performance, stability, a stress analysis of various components, and a detailed designed of some components. The class of ‘34 designed an observation airplane and a reconnaissance airplane for a future Air Force, the class of ‘35 designed a basic trainer, the class of ‘36 class was assigned an interceptor pursuit airplane, and the class of ‘37 designed a slow-speed observation and liaison airplane. A curriculum from this period is given as Table I in the Appendix.

Courses were suspended for the 1939-40 school year as all available personnel were temporarily diverted from research and development to the massive procurement and production effort then being initiated. The Material Division "froze" development on the best of the existing planes and ordered them into huge production, after which research and development of the next generation was resumed. The yearlong course resumed in the fall of 1940 with a small class of six lieutenants, one of these being Lt. Bernard A. Schriever (’41).

By the outbreak of the war, the school had graduated a total of 230 officers. Their achievements before and during the war were notable. Captain George V. Holloman (’35) earned, with Carl J. Crane, the MacKay Trophy for 1937 for the Airplane Automatic Landing System. Graduates played key roles in the development of jet aircraft. Benjamin Chidlaw (’31) was assigned the task of developing a jet aircraft project using the Whittle engine for the AAC; Laurence Craigie (’35) became the first military man to fly a US jet, the XP-59A Aircomet; and Ralph Swofford Jr. (’36) was assigned as project officer for the next generation P-80.

By 1943 it was clear that younger officers must be prepared to replace the rather limited number of engineering officers. When civilian schools could not produce the numbers, nor the most critical specialties the Air Force needed, the AAF Engineering School was reopened on 1 April 1944 with a compressed program. One of the graduates was Captain Dan Daley (’45), who returned to the AFIT faculty and later served (1967-1984) as Head of Aeronautical Engineering at the United States Air Force Academy.

Degree Programs and Accreditation 1946—1973

In 1945 the Army Air Forces (AAF) Scientific Advisory Group, directed by Dr. Theodore von Kármán, completed a study of the role of research and development for the post-war AAF. In the cover letter to the report, von Kármán wrote, "the men in charge of the future Air Forces should always remember that problems never have final or universal solutions, and only a constant inquisitive attitude toward science and a ceaseless and swift adaptation to new developments can maintain the security of this nation through world air supremacy." On 15 December 1945 the AAF Institute of Technology was officially authorized.

The Army Air Corps made the decision to reconstitute the school at Wright-Patterson into a technical institute comparable to the best in the US, beginning as an undergraduate school and granting only undergraduate degrees. A graduate school with courses comparable to similar courses provided by the best civilian technical institutions was to be established as soon as a qualified staff and students could be acquired. The initial restriction to undergraduate studies was a matter of feasibility. By the end of the WW II, the officer corps of the Army Air Force was found to be somewhat lacking in educational attainment, a situation brought about by the fact that a college degree had not been a requirement for earning a commission through pilot training.

The "blueprint" for the new school was created by a committee of civilian educators headed by Dr. John Markham of MIT. Other members were Professors W. H Pickering and E. E. Sechler of Cal Tech and T. H. Troller of the Case School of Applied Science. All except Pickering were aeronautical engineers. The committee provided the detailed design of a two-year curriculum, including descriptions for individual courses. The initial curriculum is in Table II of the Appendix.

Hiring took longer than anticipated, but by the fall of 1946 eight civilians and five officers had been recruited for the faculties of Engineering and Industrial Administration. The AAFIT opened on 30 September 1946 with 189 officers in the student body. Of these, 132 were in the College of Engineering with 100 enrolled in the new two-year program. But the memories of the first class of students had been overestimated. During the first week it was found necessary to stop all courses so that the instructors could teach a six-week review of mathematics. A one-month review in mathematics was built into later programs. Originally, the Institute had no laboratories of its own as it was intended that on-base laboratories would be used. But the availability of those facilities was soon found to be uncertain and the faculty began to develop their own. It is of interest to note that in 1949 the USAFIT student branch of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences had 24 members.

But the hiring of faculty, the "rustiness" of student backgrounds, and the development of laboratories were not the only challenges facing the new school. Even after it opened, differences of opinion remained as to the appropriate nature of instruction in the Institute. Opposition to accreditation and degrees emerged within the Air Force and was strengthened by a group of distinguished educators newly constituted to provide advice to the new AF on educational matters. They recommended that the undergraduate work should be highly specialized – limited to courses of study not normally available in civilian institutions. To some AF leaders, it became apparent that the kind of AAFIT seen by the Markham Committee and supported by Air Force would prove to be a duplication of civilian schools and that – as a result – sooner or later the Air Force would lose it. Nonetheless, the decision was made to continue development of a "technical school comparable to the best in the United States," awarding degrees at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

The Air Force needed officers with graduate degrees as well and wished to send the new graduates (who now held diplomas, but not degrees) to civilian institutions. Some of the graduates convinced their prior undergraduate school to accept AFIT credits in transfer, thereby enabling them to earn an undergraduate degree. Others earned admission to graduate schools through performance on the Graduate Record Examination

By 1951, the curriculum of engineering sciences had been divided into two sections, aero-mechanical and electronics, with a common first year and specialization in the second. And, as the school moved towards earning accreditation, these became formally treated as two separate programs and were so designated from 1956 through the end of the program.

In 1950, the Institute began developing graduate programs. Enrollments of undergraduates were reduced, retaining enough to keep a sound base under the graduate programs. The first students to enter resident graduate studies completed a yearlong Advanced Engineering Management Course in December of 1951. Students graduating in August of the following year (1952), including nine students in Aeronautical, completed the Institute’s first graduate programs in engineering. The program was originally one year in length, but was soon expanded into an eighteen-month program. An early curriculum is given in Table III of the Appendix. An Air Ordnance program was begun in the fall of 1953. Later renamed Air Weapons, it continued for 21 years.

The Department of Defense submitted to the Bureau of Budget in 1952 and in 1953 proposed legislation authorizing the award of master’s and doctor’s degrees to students in the Resident College. But there were difficulties. The regional accrediting agency (North Central) was reluctant to support the granting of undergraduate degrees by institutions that were primarily technical or scientific. It initially (1953) recommended that USAFIT concentrate its efforts on the graduate programs rather than seeking authority to grant undergraduate degrees. The US Office of Education was unconvinced that government-supported schools should grant degrees at all, and there were those in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who did not feel that the Air Force should be conducting ‘schools of higher education.’ But on August 30 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed public Law 733 of the 83^rd Congress, giving degree granting authority for programs completed in the Resident College of the United States Air Force Institute of Technology, subject to accreditation by a nationally recognized accreditation association or authority.

Arrangements for an accreditation visit were made, and in October of 1955, ECPD granted accreditation for both curricula. With accreditation obtained, Public Law 733 took effect, and the Institute had the authority to grant degrees. On March 13 1956 the first 22 MS degrees were granted. Later in that year the first accredited graduate and undergraduate degrees in aerospace engineering were awarded. Students who had completed the program and earned a diploma prior to accreditation were given an opportunity to earn a degree through a process of completing additional courses.

ABET had suggested that emphasis be increased in the area of socio-humanistic studies. Faculty identified the requirements of 12 other programs, and found the range to be from 4 to 45. The average degree requirement was found to be 218 QH, with a non-technical requirement of 40, including 11.5 in English and Speech, and 20 in Socio-Humamistic studies. The (predictable) AFIT response was to replace three electives and one management course with courses taken from a quickly created department of Humanities.

As graduate enrollments increased, the size of the undergraduate classes was further reduced. By 1956, the faculty had grown to a total of 55, with 25 of these being in Aeronautical, Mechanical Engineering, and Mechanics. The ratio between military and civilian faculty was maintained at 50%.

A proposal to eliminate the AFIT School of Engineering and create graduate programs at the newly formed Air Force Academy was given serious consideration in 1959. But the arguments for retaining graduate engineering education at Wright Patterson were found to be compelling. On April 1, 1960, on the basis of programs in the School of Engineering, the Institute was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools to grant degrees through the master’s level. A resident doctoral program in Aerospace Engineering was begun in July of 1965, with preliminary accreditation by North Central in August of 1965 and full accreditation in 1972.

The successful launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 resulted in an immediate response. Courses in astronautics were added to existing curricula and, on September 8, 1958, the first class began a two-year astronautics program at AFIT. The faculty designed a curriculum built around sequences of courses in mathematics, basic sciences, and engineering sciences. To this foundation were added advanced and highly specialized courses more directly applicable to work with anti-missile systems, reconnaissance satellites, space weapons, or other new weapon systems. The original curriculum was very broad, highly structured, and rather inflexible. The eight-quarter curriculum contained required courses from six different departments and had only two electives. One of the students in that first class, Captain Donn Eisele, would ten years later take part in the first Apollo flight.

A program in Space Facilities introduced in 1962 was of a special interest and uniqueness. It had the objective of providing the educational basis for the engineering competence to design, develop, test and eventually operate and maintain fixed facilities and supporting systems in free space and on the lunar surface. The curricula included such courses as lunar soil mechanics, direct methods of energy conversion, the methodology of engineering systems required for sustained space operations, and studies of the structure of space, moon, and planets. The program was discontinued in the early seventies when it was determined that the Air Force had no manned mission in space.

Ten astronauts have attended AFIT, with eight graduating from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics or its predecessor departments: Fabian , Bluford, Mullane, Lindsey, Grissom, Cooper, Eisele, and Brown. Additionally, Ford is in training. Anders and Chaffee attended AFIT, but in other programs.

The doctoral program initiated in 1965 was designated as a program in Aerospace Engineering but was actually implemented as an interdisciplinary program involving all the instructional departments of the School of Engineering. Two years of course work were completed at AFIT, with research for the dissertation to be done in a specially arranged four-year assignment to an AF laboratory.

The Air Force strategy for managing advanced degree education changed in 1969. Under the new concept, specific educational requirements were determined from a billet-by-billet audit, rather than by estimating the requirement to educate towards a broader, or career-long, need. This philosophy contributed to a reduction in the "apparent" need for advanced education in the Air Force. The change in concept was implemented in AFIT programs through the identification for each graduate program of a small core program consisting of mathematics and the appropriate basic sciences and engineering. These provided the background for a more advanced specialty, consisting (typically) of two graduate sequences and the thesis.

A program in Systems Engineering was developed by the faculty and implemented in 1971 with first graduates in 1973. The highly interdisciplinary program contained a core program emphasizing mathematics and aerospace engineering with advanced work in probability and statistics, systems management, and systems modeling. This program was unique for AFIT in that a group design study was used in lieu of a thesis. 

With 31 assigned faculty, the combined size of the mechanics, aeronautical engineering and mechanical engineering faculties reached its peak in the late ‘60s. This represented 40% of the entire faculty of the school of with aspects of aerospace engineering were introduced at AFIT between 1946 and 1974. The numbers of students graduating from each are given in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Graduates in Aerospace Engineering

 An Emphasis on Research, 1974-2001

By the summer of 1969 only graduate studies were offered in Aerospace Engineering. And by the early 1970’s research activity by the faculty was well established, forming a base from which significant increases would occur as the School of Engineering focused on graduate education and research. Research productivity measures for the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics are given in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Research Publications, Aero and Astro