Bell Aircraft

Some of them didn't.

So when the Army Air Forces and the newly formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, what we'd eventually call NASA, sat down with Bell Aircraft to design a research plane purpose-built to go supersonic, they were not kidding around.

The Bell X-1 was not an evolutionary step.

It was a deliberate, calculated punch through what many believed was an impenetrable ceiling.

By the time the war came he was already the kind of pilot who made other pilots quiet down and watch.

He ended up at Bell Aircraft as a test pilot during the war.

Bell was working on early jet fighters at a time when jet fighters were exotic and unpredictable things that could kill you in ways the propeller community hadn't invented yet.

Johnston flew the Bell P-59 era Comet, America's first jet aircraft.

Hoover was recognized as exceptional, even within that group.

And when the Bell Aircraft Corporation had finished building a rocket-powered research plane called the Bell X-1, and when the Army Air Forces selected a young pilot named Chuck Yeager to attempt the first supersonic flight, they needed someone flying chase.

Someone fast enough to observe.

Someone skilled enough to be useful if something went wrong, they selected Hoover on October 14, 1947.

He grew up in Emporia, Kansas, started washing airplanes as a teenager to pay for lessons.

By the time he got to Boeing in 1948, he had flown for the Army Air Forces, then went to Bell Aircraft in upstate New York, where he flew the P-39 Airacobra and eventually the XP-59 Airacomet, America's first jet-powered airplane.

Johnston was part of the first generation of American test pilots who understood jet flight not as an evolution of propeller flying, but as something genuinely different, something you had to learn on its own terms.

At Boeing, he became chief test pilot.

The X-1 was an orange, bullet-shaped rocket plane, and that description isn't just poetic.

Bell Aircraft designed the fuselage specifically to mirror the profile of a fifty-caliber machine gun round, because at that time, the fifty-caliber armor-piercing bullet was the only object anyone could point to and say with confidence it travels supersonically without coming apart.

If a bullet shape was stable at those speeds, the logic went, maybe an airplane built to that profile could be, too.

It was about thirty feet long, compact.

It could not take off from the ground under its own power.

It was mated in the belly of a modified B-29 Superfortress and dropped at altitude, and the pilot lit the rockets in the air.

The program was a joint effort between the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, which became NASA a decade later, along with Bell Aircraft and the Air Force.

Competitive pressure was real.

He wore a Stetson the way other pilots wore headsets, and he spoke about aircraft performance the way a mechanic speaks about an engine: with precision and without drama.

He had come up through propeller-driven fighters, transitioned into jet-powered experimental aircraft during the postwar years, and had flown programs at Bell Aircraft before Boeing brought him in as their chief of production flight testing.

What that means is, Tex Johnston was the man Boeing put in the airplane when the stakes were highest.

When the new machine needed to go somewhere nobody had been before, Johnston went there first.

I did a little Google search quickly.

Who is Larry Bell? Why does he have so many damn auditoriums? Apparently, Larry Bell was an industrialist and the founder of the Bell Aircraft Corporation.

So that explains that.

Lots of venues named after Larry Bell, specifically here in Georgia.

and the only way to find out was to build an airplane specifically to go there and come back.

So they went to a company out in Buffalo, New York, Bell Aircraft, and they told Bell, build us a machine that can survive Mach 1. the man who led the design, a fellow named Robert Woods, and the team around him.

They made some smart calls.

First, forget the propeller.