While the Wright Brothers designed their flier without any scientific testing, it also did not stay aloft for very long. Refinements in aircraft speed, maneuverability and endurance came only with careful design and testing, helped along by the invention of the wind tunnel and by University of Manchester professor Osborne Reynolds, who showed that airflow over a scale model would be replicated over a full-size one (provided certain conditions are met,) The British success with the wind tunnel encouraged the U.S. to come up with their own.

On this day, June 29, in 1929 the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would eventually become NASA opened the first high-speed wind tunnel at Langley Field in Virginia.

Still, there would be some things that a scale model experiment could not show, like the effects of a rotating propeller on aircraft control, or how the temperature of the engine would effect the pattern of air. That was what prompted the creation of a full-scale wind tunnel, which would create the next generation supersonic planes.