Robert G. Loewy

United States of America

 

Dr. Robert (Bob) Gustav Loewy was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Feb. 12, 1926, he grew up in the city’s Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood and graduated from Simon Gratz High School in 1944. Loewy joined the US Navy’s officer training program to pay for college, later serving in the Naval Reserve from 1947–1950. He studied first at Cornell University and then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for his bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, graduating in 1947 after only three years. He then earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering in just three semesters from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1948; his thesis was on the effects of hard landings on airplanes.

In 1948–1949, Loewy worked at the Glenn L. Martin Company as a senior vibration engineer, where he worked on vibration and flutter analyses of the AM Mauler, XB-51, 404 (VC-3A) and P5M Marlin aircraft, and the Matador and Viking missiles. From 1949 to 1952, and again from 1953 to 1955, he performed wind tunnel and theoretical research on fixed- and rotary-wing flutter at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL, spun off as Calspan in 1972). During the second tour at CAL, he developed a rotary-wing unsteady aerodynamic model, a groundbreaking contribution to rotorcraft aerodynamics. This model, referred to as “Loewy’s rotary wing theory,” became a cornerstone for understanding the forces acting on helicopter rotor blades.

In 1952 and again from 1955 to 1962, Loewy was successively Staff Stress Engineer, Chief of Dynamics and then Chief Technical Engineer at Piasecki Helicopter Corp., which during that period became Vertol Aircraft Corp., and then the Vertol Division of Boeing (today’s Boeing Vertical Lift in Philadelphia). Among the aircraft he worked on were the H-21, HUP-4, H-16, 107, CH-46 and CH-47 helicopters and the VZ-2 tilt-wing aircraft. During this time, he completed his PhD in engineering mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962.

Loewy joined the University of Rochester, in New York, in 1962 as Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Sciences, taking a leave of absence to serve as the Chief Scientist of the US Air Force (1965–1966) at the age of 39. He later was appointed to the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, eventually serving as the vice chair (1970–1971) and chair (1971–1974), continuing on as a member for at least a decade. Loewy returned to Rochester (1966–1973), later serving as Director of the Space Science Center and then Dean of the College of Engineering & Applied Sciences, beginning in 1967. He coauthored the book Dynamics of Rotating Shafts in 1970.

In 1973, Loewy became Vice President and Provost at RPI, in Troy, New York. There he founded the Rensselaer Rotorcraft Technology Center (RRTC), established by the Army Research Office in 1982 as one of the three original Centers of Excellence in Rotary Wing Aircraft Technology (the joint Army-Navy-NASA effort today is known as the Vertical Lift Research Centers of Excellence). He stepped down as provost and served as the RPI Institute Professor of Aeronautical Engineering and Mechanic and director of the center. His mentoring of graduate students led to the development of a comprehensive nonlinear model for composite rotor blades. During this period, he also published penetrating reviews of the state of the art in rotorcraft vibrations as well as the emerging field of smart structures as applied to aeroelasticity. He was inducted into RPI’s Alumni Hall of Fame in 2009.

In 1993, Loewy moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), taking the positions of Chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and William R.T. Oaks Professor. The Guggenheim School later named its library after him. In 2008, he retired to his hometown of Philadelphia but continued to support Georgia Tech and the vertical flight community until recently; he and his wife endowed the Lila S. and Robert G. Loewy Ph.D. Lectureship in rotorcraft technology in 2015.

He was a member of AIAA since 1944 and joined VFS in 1952. He was a member of the VFS President’s Club and the Gold Circle Club. He delivered the 4th Annual Alexander A. Nikolsky Honorary Lectureship, “Helicopter Vibrations: A Technological Perspective,” at Forum 40 in May 1984. He was selected as an Honorary Fellow of VFS in 1966; he became a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in 1974 and an AIAA Honorary Fellow in 1993. Over the years, Loewy served AIAA as a member of its Aerospace Department Chair Association, Honors and Awards Committee, and Applied Aerodynamics Technical Committee. He was an editor of the AIAA Education Series and an editorial advisor to the AIAA Journal.

AIAA awarded him the 1958 Lawrence A. Sperry Award for his work on rotary-wing aircraft and he gave the 1999 Dryden Research Lectureship in Research, “Avionics: A ‘New’ Senior Partner in Aeronautics.” Loewy was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1971 for contributions to the engineering of rotary-wing and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. He was selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1981.

Loewy championed the early use of smart structures technology to simplify control systems and was awarded the Daniel Guggenheim Medal in 2006, “For pioneering contributions to rotary-wing aeroelasticity and unsteady aerodynamics, which had an enormous influence on rotary-wing technology, and his contributions to education and public service in aeronautics.” In 1997, he was a recipient of the Spirit of St. Louis Medal given by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for “his pioneering contributions to rotary-wing aeroelasticity, unsteady aerodynamics and structural dynamics.”

He served on several boards of the National Research Council and several other government committees. He was chair of the Air Force Aeronautical System Division Advisory Group (1979–1984), the FAA Technical Advisory Panel (1974–1975) and the NASA Aeronautics Advisory Committee (1977–1983). Loewy was awarded NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Air Force Meritorious Civilian Service Award and was twice awarded the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service by the Air Force.

Loewy was tremendously influential in the early life of VFS, then known as the American Helicopter Society (AHS), as documented in the Society’s book, Advancing Vertical Flight: A History of the Vertical Flight Society, published at Forum 75 in May 2019. He was the VFS Technical Director in 1963–1964, where he helped form the Society's first technical committees (Aerodynamics, Aircraft Operations, Avionics, Dynamics, Helicopter & VTOL Design, Propulsion, Structures, and Testing), strengthened the peer-review process for The Journal of the AHS and encouraged international outreach. He was the journal editor in chief (1964–1965) and later served on the Board of Directors (2000–2004), including the last two years as Chair of the Board.

Over the decades, Loewy also authored or coauthored scores of technical papers and articles with VFS, AIAA and other institutions. He was a mentor and inspiration to thousands of students, colleagues and VFS members. In one of his last public speaking events, he was a plenary speaker in the “VFS Legacy Panel: 75 Years of Advancing Vertical Flight” at the 75th Annual Forum in Philadelphia in May 2019 (see www.vtol.org/videos).

Bob Loewy had an influential career in industry, government and academia for more than 70 years, largely in rotary-wing aircraft. He was a structural dynamicist and an aeroelastician, and conducted research in these disciplines on rotorcraft, as well as fixed-wing aircraft, space launch vehicles and satellites. Loewy passed away on January 3, 2025 at the Jersey Shore, near the beach where he spent every summer of his life. He was 98.

According to his obituary, Bob Loewy was “a brilliant engineer, a consummate gentleman, and an accomplished pianist who could play anything by ear.”

VFS Updates: In Memoriam - Vertiflite March/April 2025