Ross Armstrong McFarland

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Ross McFarland (Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University)

Ross Armstrong McFarland helped develop standards for comfort and safety in transatlantic flights and is a pioneer in the field of ergonomics.

Dr. Ross Armstrong McFarland (July 18, 1901—November 7, 1976) was born in Denver, Colorado but moved to Missouri at age five. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1923 and his Ph. D. in psychology from Harvard in 1928, after which he taught psychology at Columbia from 1928 to 1937. He then joined Harvard, where he researched conditions which affected human performance, particularly during airplane flights, culminating in his Human Factors in Air Transport Design (1946) and Human Factors in Air Transportation (1953). He helped develop physical guidelines to determine good pilots and co-authored The Human Body in Equipment Design (1965), a classic in the field of ergonomics.