Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

—the West Area Computers received
many assignments from the lab’s Flight
Research Division—it was not good
enough to say that a plane flew well or
badly; engineers now quantified a given
vehicle’s performance against a ninepage
checklist under the three broad
categories of longitudinal stability and
control (up-and-down motion), lateral
stability and control (side-to-side
motion), and stalling (sudden loss of lift,
flight’s life force). The raw data from the
work of these “fresh-air” engineers also
found a home on Dorothy’s desk.
What total war and the American
production miracle drew into sharp relief
—and what Dorothy soon learned—was
the fact that an airplane wasn’t one
machine for a single purpose: it was a
terrifically complex bundle of physics