About the Author

Author

William H. Mason (1947–2019) developed a deep passion for airplanes quite early in his life. Growing up in Southwest Virginia, he spent countless hours building and flying model airplanes as a teenager. When he was an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, he seized upon opportunities to gain practical experience, working summers at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was involved with various F-4 aircraft projects, including the swing-wing F-4, and at the Edwards Air Force Base, California, working on US Army Huey Cobra helicopters. In 1974, he began his fifteen-year professional aerospace engineering career with Grumman, where he made valuable contributions to many high-profile projects, such as: (i) the X-29, an experimental aircraft with a forward-swept wing and canard; (ii) the NASA/Grumman Research Fighter Configuration with supercruise and maneuvering capabilities; and (iii) the SC3 Wing Concept, which set a record for low drag at high-lift supersonic performance. From 1989 until his passing in 2019, he was a dedicated educator at Virginia Tech. Right after returning to VT in 1989, he devoted himself to sharing his knowledge and insights with students and colleagues. His legacy lives on with a large number of students who either took the courses he offered in aircraft design, applied computational aerodynamics, and configuration aerodynamics or performed research in aerospace systems design and multidisciplinary optimization. He co-authored Applied Computational Aerodynamics: A Modern Engineering Approach—one of the first textbooks on this topic for undergraduates—published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. He also authored or co-authored more than 100 technical papers and reports. He was a lifelong Hokie, having earned his BS degree in 1971, a MS in 1972, and a PhD in 1975, all in aerospace engineering from Virginia Tech. Mason was an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Editor

Pradeep Raj is a Collegiate Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech and spent twelve years serving as a faculty advisor of student capstone aircraft design teams and conducting collaborative research in simulation driven design to enable development of quality affordable aerial vehicles. He joined VT in 2012 after thirty-two years (1979–2011) with Lockheed Martin, a premier aerospace and defense corporation. For the first twenty years there, he held key technical leadership positions and made noteworthy contributions to advancing the effectiveness of computational simulation capabilities for meeting aircraft design needs. For the next twelve years, he held executive leadership and management positions before retiring from the Advanced Development Programs organization commonly known as the Skunk Works^®, which is world renowned for creating breakthrough technologies and landmark aircraft. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS). He earned a PhD in aerospace engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976 after earning a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering and a bachelor’s in electrical technology, both from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.