Eight-Foot High Speed Tunnel
wind tunnel of NACA, 1936-2011
The Eight-Foot High Speed Tunnel, also known as Eight-Foot Transonic Tunnel, was a wind tunnel located in Building 641 of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. It was a National Historic Landmark.
The tunnel was completed in 1936 at a cost of $36,266,000. Because of its high speed and Bernoulli's principle, the pressure in the test section is much lower than that in the rest of the tunnel. This required a structure that could withstand an inward force due to the pressure difference. Instead of steel construction, it was built from reinforced concrete with walls up to 1 ft (0.3 m) thick. This resulted in an "igloo-like" structure at the test section. The wind tunnel was designed as a single-return tunnel capable of moving air at speeds up to a Mach number up to 0.75. It was powered by an 8,000 hp (6,000 kW) electric motor. It was repowered to 16,000 hp (12,000 kW) to give Mach number 1 capability in 1945.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5348927. Authority coordinates are 37.080, -76.341. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eight-Foot High Speed Tunnel” 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.