December 12, 2003

Letter from the Dean of Engineering

Dean Nino A. Masnari (Photo: Roger Winstead)

December 17, 2003, marks the centennial of the Wright Brothers’ flight, and nowhere is there a better place to celebrate than right here in North Carolina. The one hundredth anniversary of this historic achievement in Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk allows us to reflect on our own connections with aviation history and to celebrate a century of flight.

Among the many activities that have taken place around the nation to commemorate the event was Energy Challenge ’03, a national competition held at Kitty Hawk in May 2003. It seems especially fitting that our own NC State students took first place in this contest. We are particularly proud of these students because this event represented much more than a contest to construct a hang glider from paper wings. The multidisciplinary team of students worked together to develop an outreach program, an educational website and a poster contest for children in grades four through eight, involving them in problem-solving about ways to conserve energy and natural resources.

In the spirit of commemorating the historic event, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, which has a long history of involvement with aviation dating back to the Wright brothers’ flight, has chosen to establish an endowment of $75,000 within the College for the Curtiss-Wright Centennial of Flight Scholarship, which supports students who have an interest in aviation.

NC State University’s own aeronautical involvements span the decades. One milestone concerns our alumna Katharine Stinson, who was not only the first woman to receive an engineering degree from NC State — a mechanical engineering degree with aeronautical option in 1941 — but also the first woman engineer hired by the Federal Aviation Administration, then known as the Civil Aeronautics Administration.

Through the years, NC State has enjoyed a long relationship with NASA. Most recently, NC State is one of six universities working together with NASA in the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA). The world-class center will allow researchers from government, academia and industry to collaborate on aerospace research, develop new technologies, and educate and inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

NASA called upon our Department of Nuclear Engineering in the reconstruction of the space shuttle Columbia after the 2003 disaster. The PULSTAR reactor was used to perform analysis on the shuttle’s wing as part of the investigation of the accident, and the media contacted one of our professors, Dr. Fred DeJarnette, for his expert opinion because of his close ties to the space shuttle. Fred heads up the North Carolina Space Grant Consortium, which works with NASA to encourage young people in the areas of math and science.

The progress made — from that historic morning on the sand dunes of North Carolina on December 17, 1903, to today’s innovations in supersonic and hypersonic aircraft design and technology — is nothing short of astounding, and this most certainly is just cause for celebrating the centennial of flight.

— Nino A. Masnari
Dean, College of Engineering
Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

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