Arsenal of Defense: Fort Worth's Miltary Legacy

Chapter 9 Bell Helicopters

Chapter 9 Bell Helicopters Lawrence D. (Larry) Bell and Bell Helicopter Corporation transformed the Dallas-Fort Worth “Mid-Cities” (as the communities between Dallas and Fort Worth are known in the Metroplex) of eastern Tarrant County and added massive defense spending to the area’s economy in the last half of the twentieth century. That influence continued undiminished into the new century. The arrival of Bell Helicopter between World War II and the Korean War was one of those unexpected gifts that a city sometimes fortuitously receives. Like the Canadians in World War I and Reuben Fleet with Consolidated at the outbreak of World War II, Larry Bell was just looking for a good place to move. For each of those men and their enterprises, Fort Worth was that place. Bell Helicopter Company did not begin locally, so when it came to Fort Worth in 1950 it rented the old Globe factory from the U.S. government until it could build its own facility in Hurst. Because the city of Fort Worth incorporated the land on which the Hurst plant would be built, the company is technically located in Fort Worth. Bell was not the first to build helicopters, but the sketchy early development of helicopters in the four decades before Bell, emphasizes the importance of Bell’s later success . Although others may have gotten a head start, his company eventually emerged as the giant of the industry.1 The word helicopter—meaning spiral wing—dates to 1872. The idea, however, can be traced back as far as 1483 when Leonardo da Vinci drew plans for a contraption that looked like a forerunner of the modern helicopter . He wrote, “there shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, ‘tis for some other.” Experimentation with helicopters began in Europe as early as 1907 with machines capable of lifting a man off the ground. In that year Louis Breguet of France flew his gyroplane two feet off the ground for nearly a minute. A machine designed by George de Bothezat flew at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio, on December 18, 1922, six feet above the ground for one minute and forty-two seconds. Six months later, Juan de la Cierva flew at Madrid, Spain, in a rotary wing aircraft, which he called an 135 Bell Helicopters autogiro. Between 1929 and 1932, the Pitcairn Autogiro Company, established by Harold H. Pitcairn of Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, built a few autogiros, but they were not true helicopters. Although the autogiro could not take off and land vertically, it could take off and land in less distance than a winged airplane.The first successful flight of a true helicopter, a Focke -Achgelis, FA-61, occurred in Germany in 1936. A year later at Bremen, Germany, a woman pilot named Hanna Reitsch flew the same machine for more than one hour. During World War II, a nineteen-year-old American genius named Stanley Hiller built a helicopter that he called the XH-44, “X” for experimental, “H” for Hiller, and “44” for the year 1944.2 Russian émigré Igor Sikorsky would spearhead the most successful early American attempts at helicopter manufacture, however. Before he came to the United States, the Imperial Aero Club of Russia had awarded Sikorsky License No. 64 on August 18, 1911, when his 1909 helicopter actually got off the ground. The next year he flew a larger model at the end of a rope. Neither machine could carry a load, however. During World War I he built bombers for Nicholas II, czar of Russia. In March 1918, during the Russian revolution, Sikorsky escaped the country, eventually arriving in New York City. After four years of translating for the Russian Institute and designing aircraft at night, he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation on March 15, 1923, having persuaded fellow Russian immigrants to invest. His first test flight of a direct lift aircraft came on April 20, 1939. On the strength of Sikorsky’s work, the U.S. government gave him a contract in 1940 for the world’s first production helicopter. Less than 400 helicopters were built in the U.S. during World War II, about half by Sikorsky and the rest by Nash-Kelvinator Corporation in Detroit.3 After World War II, Larry Bell soon would challenge Sikorsky, and their two firms became the main helicopter manufacturers in the 1950s. A third important American helicopter designer, Frank Piasecki, built twenty helicopters for the U.S. Navy in 1943. (His Piasecki...