In well over a decade of researching and digesting material for one of the larger special-interest aviation bibliographies ever compiled, I chose many NACA/NASA, RAE, Cranfield, and other research reports and memoranda as historically and technically important, as well as personally interesting. They may make up as much as 15% -20% of several thousand entries. All had naturally been declassified, most long ago. This is precious stuff for an enthusiast and full of survival as well as "how-to" lessons for designers and builders. During that time I also made friends with some very talented and historically important researchers in aerodynamics and creators of some marvelous aircraft, among whom one, at least, is heard from in the internet conversation below. Have a "listen"...
Wed May 8, 2013 4:20 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "David Lednicer" dlednicer
Folks,
As many of you might know, there has been an ever-expanding effort in the United States to restrict the export of technical information. This has recently reached an extreme. On March 20th, using a potential espionage case as a pretext, a member of Congress demanded that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) be taken off line. NASA duly complied. A note appeared where NTRS used to be, saying that all documents were being reviewed for export compliance.
Today, I got an email saying that NTRS was back up. I went in and started searching for some documents I need to support some programs I'm working on. I was surprised to get no hits on quite a few, so I started searching for documents I know were there before the shutdown. To my surprise, many of the NACA Wartime Reports, published just after World War II, are gone. It now appears that this effort is extending to anything military-related. "NACA WR L-680 Flight Tests of NACA Jet-Propulsion Exhaust Stacks on the Supermarine Spitfire Airplane" - gone. "NACA WR L-149 Flight Tests of the Lateral Control Characteristics of an F6F-3 Airplane equipped with Spring-Tab Ailerons" - gone. "NACA WR L-565 Measurements of the Flying Qualities of a Hawker Hurricane Airplane" - gone. Do a search on "P-51" in the title and you will discover that all the reports are gone. Personally, I'm about to blow a cork over the ***** of this move.
If you are a US citizen and as opposed to this as I am, I encourage you to contact your elected representatives. I have never before contacted my Representative and Senators, but they now all know my feelings on this subject. If we don't make ourselves heard, next thing you know, they will be pulling copies of these reports out of libraries, for export compliance.
I personally am downloading as many documents, as fast as possible, from the reopened website, before these are gone too.
Wed May 8, 2013 4:31 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "Bruno De Michelis" sigrana
The governments of the world seem to have finally reched their aim: to make the mass so ignorant that it will be easier to control. It is not only happening in US, David. It is a global situation. Already 6 years ago, when I wrote and published "The Russian Aero-marine", a unique encyclopaedia covering all Russian and imported seaplanes, flying boats and ekranoplans from 1910 to 2000, I found it very difficult to gain the required information, which took over 3 years of research. If anyone is interested, the work is still available.
Cheers from Bruno
Wed May 8, 2013 5:04 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "David Lednicer" dlednicer
It gets even better: NACA Report-254 "Distribution of Pressure Over Model of the Upper Wing and Aileron of a Fokker D-VII Airplane", published in 1927, was there on NTRS on March 13th and now it's gone. I guess data on WWI aircraft are now export controlled. To get a copy, I had to import it from
the Cranfield University website in the UK. Funny enough, many reports on the F-16, F-18 and F-35 are still there. When will this insanity end?
Wed May 8, 2013 5:13 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "Bruno De Michelis" sigrana
I do not think it will end very soon: this is only the beginning. The governments are in turn controlled by the various banksters, who are intending to axe the world population by extreme percentages etc.etc. We better go and fly trikes until we can.
From: Marc de Piolenc <piolenc@...> Date: Thu May 9, 2013 8:15 - 37 am
NACA reports are available from AERADE in the UK: http://aerade.cranfield.ac.uk/
Also a good source for British research, obviously.
I agree that we have to light a fire under Congress and the politically panicked, tim'rous fools at NASA.
Marc
Having confidently announced that AERADE could provide NACA reports pruned from the NASA TRS, I did a search for what Dave wanted and...came up empty. It seems our cousins are collaborating with this Night and Fog campaign.
Perhaps some politically aware list member could tell us who the key Congresscritters are who control NASA's funding. Tying the next paycheck to making available again the results of decades of taxpayer-funded research might be a good idea.
In the meantime, some research libraries have a collection of NACA reports on microfiche originally compiled by a company called UPDATA. I seem to remember, when I consulted that collection at CalTech, that it was pretty complete where the Wartime Reports are concerned.
I'm adding Dave's documents to my Wants list, with cross-references from the WR numbers which were applied after the documents were issued to the original report numbers. Hopefully, something will turn up.
Best,
Marc de Piolenc
Another thought has occurred to me, and that is to flood NASA with Freedom of information Act requests. There's plenty of bibliographic material available showing what exists - more than enough to establish the existence of a "system of records" and of documents within that system. Each FOIA request must be answered with either the document(s) requested or a justification for withholding the document(s). A few enthusiasts (better yet, a few professional societies) could generate enough legitimate requests to backlog NASA's FOIA office. And there is a time limit for response, after which a Federal lawsuit is possible. Not something I would care to undertake alone, but there are plenty of people pissed off by this move...
Best,
Marc
"It wasn't NASA's decision:
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/333213/
It was congressman Frank Wolf who arbitrarily shut it down
to score points as a national security watchdog at the
expense of a relatively small group of people, ie us.
Nothing really new gets onto that server anyway and most of
it is mirrored on servers that the US government doesn't
have direct jurisdiction over so this interruption is just
dickish symbolism. If you know the report number you can
usually find an alternate source with Google. For instance:
I just now downloaded one of the reported that has been
deleted from the NTRS server, titled "Flight tests of NACA
jet-propulsion exhaust stacks on the Supermarine Spitfire
airplane", from the DTIC Online server:
<https://www.google.com/search?q=NACA+WR+L-680&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs>
That's some real effective representation we've got there"
And...
"Ladies & Gentlemen;
"The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do
Nothing"
I am glad to see that there is a healthy amount of outrage here at this Neo
McCarthyist Nutter.
Perhaps someone should explain to this buffoon (Congressman Wolf) that the
WW2 era papers on the 'Meredith Effect' were in fact written at Farnborough
in the '30s.
Best Wishes; Mike"
Fri May 10, 2013 2:52 pm (PDT) . Posted by: "Marc" fmdepiolenc It WAS NASA's decision.
One Congressman does not have the power to dictate policy to an Executive Branch agency. To do that, Wolf would have had to get a bill through both houses of Congress and signed by the President dictating the new policy. Nothing of the sort happened. What did happen was that bureaucrats running a highly politicized agency panicked at a comment by one noisy "representative." What I'm saying is, they need to be taught not to pull out a hankie every time some congresscritter sneezes. There needs, in other words, to be countervailing pressure from other sources, using other means. Hence FOIA.
I've opened a database table of "disappeared" technical reports (NASA isn't the only agency pulling this nonsense - don't get me started on the DoE!). It will list bibliographic references, alternate sources if known, and will be made available to anyone who needs a list of these reports for use in a FOIA request or before a Congressional committee. I've dug out all my NACA bibliographies and indexes from backup disks to speed the process.
Best,
MarcThere will be more opinions. NASA's best on this other forum has yet to ring in on this, but you can see a bit of what's up with opportunistic politicians...again.
SK
Topic: An Interesting Exchange (Read 1750 times)