In the picture you can see part of an airfoil in the wind tunnel at Syracuse University.

The largest tunnel in our laboratory has a test section of 2ft by 2ft. The fastest speed the air inside it can reach is 70 meters per second (almost230 feet per second).

Then there is a smaller supersonic wind tunnel. "Supersonic" means "faster than the speed of sound". The speed of sound normally is 340 meters per second, or 1115 feet per second, or 760 miles per hour. The maximum speed in this tunnel is three times the speed of sound. This is normally called "Mach 3".

Finally, in the LICH Tube speeds can be reached up to Mach 6, so 6 times the speed of sound. It has a very small test section, and the high speed can only be reached during a few milliseconds (one millisecond is a thousandthof a second). But this is enough to do the experiments we want to do.

A computer is connected to an array of instruments that is used both to control the operation of the tunnels and to take readings. There are manometers, which measure a pressure difference between points, and thermometers. If you know the pressure, the temperature and the density of the air in the tunnel, you can calculate the speed that the air is flowing at.