Langley were sceptical until supersonic testing of models was done by Robert Gilruth and in April by Theodore von Karman. Jones's theory was not truly accepted until that summer when Von Karman's team of investigators found that German experts had been working on swept-wing designs for several years. Jones's thin-wing design ultimately proved superior to thick airfoils developed by Alexander Lippisch in Germany. In 1946 Jones was given the IAS Sylvanus Albert Reed Award, and transferred to Ames. The genius of Bob Jones seemed, in part, to lie in his remarkable ability to extract the essence of a problem and express it in understandable and useful terms. His approach to problems was always of a fundamental character and often yielded results of broad significance. In addition, Jones's wife Doris, an accomplished mathematician, also joined the Ames staff. Later, still at Ames, Jones promoted the idea of an oblique wing. (The first known oblique wing design was Blohm & Voss P202, proposed by Richard Vogt in 1942.) Jones's wind tunnel studies indicated that such a wing design on a supersonic transport might achieve twice the fuel economy of an aircraft with conventional wings. The concept was flight tested successfully on the NASA AD-1. This unique aircraft had a wing which pivoted about the fuselage, remaining perpendicular to it during slow flight and rotating to angles up to 60 degrees as aircraft speed increased. Analytical and wind tunnel studies by Jones indicated that a transport-sized oblique-wing aircraft flying at speeds up to Mach 1.4 (1.4 times the speed of sound) would have substantially better aerodynamic performance than an aircraft with conventional wings at the same speed. A later DARPA project using a variable sweep oblique wing was the Switchblade. Jones spent much of his time at Langley working in the Stability Research Division which pioneered many concepts that were incorporated into U.S. aircraft. As a self-trained aerodynamicist and mathematician, Jones built up a national reputation through his perceptive and original work at Langley and Ames. Awards 1946 Sylvanus Albert Reed Award (Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences) 1955 Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1971 Honorary PhD-Science, University of Colorado 1973 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1973 Member, National Academy of Engineering 1975 W. Rupert Turnbull Lecture, Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute 1978 Ludwig-Prandtl-Ring, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Luft- und Raumfahrt 1979 Honorary Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1981