Contact: Bob Ratliff
The Raspet Flight Research Laboratory at Mississippi State University is receiving a national achievement honor named for an American aviation pioneer.
The William T. Piper Sr. General Aviation Award recently was presented by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the 1998 World Aviation Congress and Exposition in Anaheim, Calif.
Named for the man whose name and airplane are synonymous with general aviation, the award recognizes the lab's 50 years of continuous aviation-related research.
Adjoining Starkville's Bryan Field, the Raspet lab is the research unit of MSU's aerospace engineering department. A memorial to the late August Raspet, it is the only comprehensive, university-based flight research facility in the United States.
Raspet came to Mississippi State in 1948 to conduct studies for the U.S. Office of Naval Research. He joined the faculty a year later and, at his death in 1960, was considered the leading U.S. authority on low-speed aerodynamics and the application of composite materials to aircraft.
"The objectives of the Raspet Lab always have been to conduct leading-edge research and to provide graduate and undergraduate students hands-on experience to supplement their classroom activities," said lab director A. George Bennett Jr.
Bennett, an MSU graduate, said the lab's international reputation for successfully employing modern composite materials was enhanced greatly in 1986. That was the year the research and development arm of Japan's Honda Motor Co. signed a major, multi-year contract with the university to design and assemble large aircraft components from composites.
In addition to millions of dollars in research, Honda built and equipped a modern 50,000-square-foot laboratory that later was donated to MSU. It is located near Raspet's original lab that was constructed at the Starkville airport in 1965.
Bennett said current research projects include work with Florida-based Mod-Works for automated cockpit panel design and with DuPont Aerospace for the fabrication and development of an all-carbon fiber demonstration craft.
The Raspet team also is working with Bosch Aerospace Inc. of Huntsville, Ala., on a unique propeller concept, as well as on aircraft parameter identification methods with funds provided by the Jackson-based Hearin-Hess Foundation.
Federally sponsored projects include a university/industrial project to develop large-scale composite structures for the Office of Naval Research and a NASA study of platforms to support satellite-borne remote sensing equipment.