Kazimierz Czarnecki (engineer)

Kazimierz R. Czarnecki (1916 – 30 January 2005) was an aeronautics engineer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later, for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Kazimierz R. Czarnecki was born in 1916 in Poland (at the time under occupation of the Government General of Warsaw and the Military Government of Lublin), to a Polish family. He had immigrated to the United States in an unknown year. He graduated in 1939 from the University of Alabama. He started working with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics that same year and remained through the renaming to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration until his retirement in 1978 from a position as Senior Aeronautical Research Engineer. He published many papers together with Mary W. Jackson, serving as her long-time mentor. In 1979, Jackson had organized his retirement party. Czarnecki had died on 30 January 2005, in Newport News, Virginia, United States. In the 2016 film Hidden Figures, the character of Karl Zielinski was a fictionalized version of Czarnecki featured as a wind tunnel expert, who worked together with Mary W. Jackson.