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As a pilot, Larry Bell saw his first plane at an air show, starting a lifelong fascination with aviation. Bell dropped out of high school in 1912 to join his brother in the burgeoning aircraft industry at the Glenn L. Martin Company, where by 1914 he had become shop superintendent. By 1920, Bell was vice president and general manager of Martin, then based in Cleveland. Feeling that he deserved part ownership, in late 1924, he presented Martin with an ultimatum. Mr. Martin refused, and Bell quit.
Bell was the third major aircraft builder to occupy the site. The factory complex was originally built in 1916 for the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Company,[5] and during World War I had been considered the largest airplane factory in the world.
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A somewhat larger and more powerful version of the P-39 was produced shortly before the end of World War II. Called the P-63 Kingcobra, this warplane addressed many of the shortcomings of the P-39, though it was produced too late in the war to make any significant contribution. 2,971 P-63's were built between 1943 and 1945, many delivered to the Soviet Union. Also, by that time, the Army Air Forces already had the superior P-47 Thunderbolt and P-38 Lightning fighter-bombers.
In October 1942, The Bell-built twin-jet P-59 Airacomet was the first American jet aircraft to fly. Unfortunately, performance was below expectations, roughly on par with contemporaneous propeller-driven aircraft, an outcome generally attributed to the extremely short development timeframe required by the USAAF, as well as the intense secrecy imposed on the project. Design had begun in September 1941, during which time the Bell team was guided mostly by theory, as General Electric would not finish and begin testing the first engine until March 1942. Also, General Henry "Hap" Arnold had forbidden use of wind tunnels to test and optimize the design, but later relented somewhat, only allowing the group to use the low-speed tunnel at Wright Field, Ohio. Bell engineers could only guess at the performance characteristics. Originally intended initially as a production aircraft, the P-59 nevertheless became an important experimental testbed for jet technology, providing invaluable data for development of later jet airplanes.[8]
As the postwar defense industry downsized, Bell consolidated its operations at the Wheatfield plant, near Buffalo. The aircraft factory in Marietta later became the property of the Lockheed Corporation, which has used it for producing C-130 Hercules, C-141 Starlifter, and C-5 Galaxy transport planes. Although Bell designed several more fighter plane designs during and after WW II, none of these ever entered mass-production.
Perhaps Bell Aircraft's most important contribution to the history of fixed-wing aircraft development would be the design and building of the experimental Bell X-1 rocket plane, the world's first airplane to break the sound barrier, and its follow-on, the Bell X-2. Unlike the usual designations for American aircraft, the X-1 models were successive (mostly identical) units of the X-1 program: the X-1, X-1A, X-1B, X-1C, X-1D, and X-1E.
Textron purchased the Bell Aerospace division on 5 July 1960. Bell Aerospace was composed of three divisions of Bell Aircraft, including the helicopter division. Bell Aerospace Textron continued to play a significant role in NASA's mission to land men on the Moon in the 1960s. Bell designed and built the Reaction Control system for Project Mercury's Redstone command module and a similar system was incorporated into the North American X-15 spaceplane. NASA selected Bell to develop and built the LLRV Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, three of which were built in the early 1960s to train the Apollo astronauts to land on the Moon. Bell also designed the rocket engine used in the Apollo LEM Ascent Propulsion System, which was responsible for getting NASA's astronauts off the Moon.
Soci|-t|- d'|etude et de D|-veloppement des A|-roglisseurs Marins (SEDAM) was a French-based unit of Bell founded in 1965 and builder of N500 Naviplane hovercraft,[10] as well as N.300 Naviplane and Naviplane N102. SEDAM ceased operations in 1982 and factory site re-developed for non-aviation usage.[11]
In 1942, the United Kingdom's Ministry of Aviation began a top secret project with Miles Aircraft to develop the world's first aircraft capable of breaking the sound barrier. The project resulted in the design of the turbojet-powered Miles M.52, with a maximum speed of 1,000 miles per hour (870 kn; 1,600 km/h) (over twice the existing airspeed record) in level flight, and able to climb to an altitude of 36,000 ft (11 km) in 1 min and 30 sec. The fuselage was shaped like a bullet, it had thin wings and a slab tailplane for controlled flight at the speed of sound and beyond. Miles' chief aerodynamicist, Dennis Bancroft, was interviewed many years later in 1997 on his reason for needing an all-moving tailplane in his 1944 design.
The Bell XS-1 would have a conventional horizontal tail-plane but with trimming available on the stabilizer. It would be required for pitch control when a shockwave was preventing a deflected elevator from altering the pressure distribution and pitching force on the tailplane.
Bell built a rocket plane after considering the turbojet alternative. Turbojets could not achieve the required performance at high altitude. An aircraft with both turbojet and rocket engines would be too large and complex.[5] The X-1 was, in principle, a "bullet with wings", its shape closely resembling a Browning .50-caliber (12.7 mm) machine gun bullet, known to be stable in supersonic flight.[7] The shape was followed to the extent of seating its pilot behind a sloped, framed window inside a confined cockpit in the nose, with no ejection seat.
Bell Aircraft aerodynamicists working with NACA laboratories predicted significant longitudinal trim changes during transonic flight. John Stack and Robert Gilruth at NASA recommended that Bell mount the elevator on an adjustable horizontal stabilizer.[10] Bell incorporated the stabilizer with rapid adjustment in pitch to accommodate large changes of trim.[11] A contractor test flight by Tex Johnston showed an unacceptable lost motion between the pilot's input to the horizontal stabilizer and the stabilizer actuator which was corrected before the XS-1 was handed over for the high speed research program.[12] The whole tailplane could be moved or just the elevator at fixed stabilizer settings.[13] It was placed as high as possible above the wing wake with a thinner section than for the wing to separate the high drag rise from the wing from compressibility effects on the tail. Initially, as increases in speed were made in small steps towards possibly unknown control difficulties the horizontal stabilizer was left at its pre-launch angle set on the ground as there was concern that adjusting it at high speed would cause severe control problems. Nevertheless, in October 1947, when test pilot Yeager ran out of elevator authority (no pitch control) at Mach 0.94 it took the test team by surprise until they realised that extra control was available by moving the horizontal stabilizer. The tailplane trim setting had to be accurately set on the ground to ensure a controlled drop at the beginning of a flight. Scott Crossfield relates an inadvertent one degree error flipping the X-1 on its back after being dropped from the mother plane.[14] The tailplane configuration was carried over to the X-1A series. All subsequent supersonic aircraft would either have an all-moving tailplane or be "tailless" delta winged types.[15]
Bell Aircraft chief test pilot Jack Woolams became the first person to fly the XS-1. He made a glide-flight over Pinecastle Army Airfield, in Florida, on 19 January 1946. Woolams completed nine more glide-flights over Pinecastle, with the B-29 dropping the aircraft at 29,000 feet (8,800 m) and the XS-1 landing 12 minutes later at about 110 miles per hour (180 km/h). In March 1946 the #1 rocket plane was returned to Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, New York for modifications to prepare for the powered flight tests. Four more glide tests occurred at Muroc Army Air Field near Palmdale, California, which had been flooded during the Florida tests, before the first powered test on 9 December 1946. Two chambers were ignited, but the aircraft accelerated so quickly that one chamber was turned off until reignition at 35,000 feet (11,000 m), reaching Mach 0.795. After the chambers were turned off the aircraft descended to 15,000 feet (4,600 m), where all four chambers were briefly tested.[5][17]
After Woolams died while practicing for the National Air Races in August 1946, Chalmers "Slick" Goodlin was assigned as the primary Bell Aircraft test pilot for the X-1. Goodlin made the first powered flight on 9 December 1946. Tex Johnston, Bell's chief test pilot and program supervisor, made a test flight on 22 May 1947, after complaints about the slow progress of flight tests. According to Johnston, "The contract with the Air Corps defined the tests by Bell as onboard systems verification, handling characteristics evaluation, stability and control, and performance testing to Mach 0.99." After Johnston's initial flight at 0.72 Mach, he thought the airplane was ready for supersonic flights, after the longitudinal trim system was fixed, and three more test flights.[18]
The story of Yeager's 14 October flight was leaked to a reporter from the magazine Aviation Week, and the Los Angeles Times featured the story as headline news in their 22 December issue. The magazine story was released on 20 December. The Air Force threatened legal action against the journalists who revealed the story, but none ever occurred.[23] The news of a straight-wing supersonic aircraft surprised many American experts, who like their German counterparts during the war believed that a swept-wing design was necessary to break the sound barrier.[5] On 10 June 1948, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington announced that the sound barrier had been repeatedly broken by two experimental airplanes.[24][25]
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