Dietrich Küchemann
German aerodynamicist (1911–1976)
Dietrich Küchemann CBE FRS FRAeS (11 September 1911 – 23 February 1976) was a German aerodynamicist who made several important contributions to the advancement of high-speed flight. He spent most of his career in the UK, where he is best known for his work on Concorde.
Biography
Küchemann was born in Göttingen where he studied at its University of Göttingen, home of the largest German institute of aerodynamics. He was originally going to move on to pure physics research under Max Born, a friend of his father's, but lost this chance when Born and several other Jewish members of the University staff were expelled from the country by the Nazi regime. Instead Küchemann went on to join Ludwig Prandtl in aerodynamics research. He published his doctoral thesis in 1936.
With the war looming, Küchemann volunteered for service in 1938, and as expected was given a non-combatant role in Signals. He held the rank of Unteroffizier from 1942 to 1945, but he saw no active service. During this period he continued research, notably into the problems of high speed flight, wave drag, swept wing theory and initial steps on the road to the area rule, and he designed a fuselage shape later dubbed the "Küchemann Coke Bottle".
One year after the war Küchemann moved to England and started work at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough.
The public source identifies “Dietrich Küchemann” as german aerodynamicist (1911–1976). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Dietrich, Küchemann and German.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dietrich Küchemann” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.