The Vertical Flight Society, the world’s leading professional society dedicated to advancing vertical flight, announced today that Dr. Peter F. Lorber has been selected for the 45th Annual Alexander A. Nikolsky Honorary Lectureship. The Lectureship is awarded to “an individual who has a highly distinguished career in vertical flight aircraft research and development and is skilled at communicating technical knowledge and experience.” Dr. Lorber will give his presentation, “The Complementary Roles of Experiment and Analysis in Developing Rotorcraft Aerodynamics,” at the Society’s 81st Annual Forum & Technology Display on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, at the Virginia Beach Convention Center in Virginia Beach, USA. Lorber has had a distinguished 40-year career at Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Co., and the United Technologies Research Center. He is known for several groundbreaking experiments and experimental techniques and has over 90 conference and journal publications and technical reports, as well as 16 patents. His published work has been cited by many authors in papers, reports, and textbooks. He has been honored by the Vertical Flight Society (VFS) as a Technical Fellow in 2010 and with the Dr. Alexander Klemin Award in 2018. He has also received seven UTRC and Sikorsky Special Awards, two NASA Group Achievement Awards, and the Sikorsky President’s Value Focus Award, in recognition of his accomplishments. Lorber received his Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in Applied & Engineering Physics in 1979. In 1984, he received his Ph.D in Aerodynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and joined United Technologies Research Center (UTRC). He was Principal Investigator for pressure-instrumented UH-60A model rotor and large-scale dynamics stall benchmark experiments. He led the UTRC Active Rotor Control project, Rotorcraft Separation Control and 3D Dynamic Stall contracts, and was program manager for the Variable Geometry Advanced Rotor Technology Cooperative Agreement. These efforts contributed significant insights into the physics of dynamic stall, flow control and active-rotor technologies. He was the UTRC lead engineer for powered-rotor wind tunnel tests for the S-92, UH-60 variants and the Variable Diameter Tilt Rotor (VDTR), and for RAH-66 Comanche airframe-tail interactions. Lorber joined Sikorsky Aircraft in 2004 as manager of the company’s experimental aeromechanics section, and later, the flight sciences group. In 2014, he became a Sikorsky Technical Fellow, and then a Lockheed Martin Fellow, following Sikorsky’s acquisition from United Technologies Corp. (UTC) in 2015. He was responsible for the aerodynamic validation efforts that led to the CH-53K blade aerodynamic design, and then led scale-model projects for the S-76D, X2 Technology Demonstrator, S-97 Raider and the Joint Multi-Role (JMR) Defiant for the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) competition. Advanced concept work in this period included on-blade active flaps, as well as passive and active flow control for dynamic stall. A focus has included single main rotor-airframe-empennage interactional aerodynamics for validation and enhancement of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and coordinated design and validation for coaxial rotor-propulsor-airframe performance and interactions. The latter effort included full model testing up to 250 kt (460 km/h) in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) in California. Most recently, he has been contributing to the aerodynamic design and validation for the NASA Dragonfly rotorcraft being developed for Saturn’s moon, Titan. Lorber’s Nikolsky Lecture will be a key part of the plenary session at Forum 81, on Tuesday afternoon, May 20, 2025. His detailed written treatise expanding the lecture will be featured in the Journal of the AHS, the world’s only scientific journal dedicated to vertical flight. Information on Prof. Alexander A. Nikolsky and prior Nikolsky Lectures is available at www.vtol.org/nikolsky. The Vertical Flight Society — founded in 1943 as the American Helicopter Society — is the global professional society for engineers, scientists and others working on vertical flight technology. VFS brings together industry, academia and governments to tackle the toughest challenges in vertical flight. For more than 80 years, VFS has led technology, safety, advocacy and other important initiatives, and has been the primary forum for interchange of information on vertical flight technology.
