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***image1***By 1941, both the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force were energetically pursuing development of a new generation of jet-powered fighter aircraft, but the U.S. lagged badly.
U.S. Army Air Corps Maj. Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold first became aware of the United Kingdom’s jet program when he attended a demonstration of a British jet April 1941 and was given the plans for the aircraft’s power plant. He took the plans back to the United States and gave them to General Electric with a contract to develop a similar jet engine.
General Arnold also gave the Bell Aircraft Corporation the contract to develop the airframe because Bell had a reputation for innovation. Unfortunately, while Bell was innovative, the aircraft it produced tended to be dogs, and its design for America’s first jet fighter, the XP-59A “Airacomet,” was no exception.
The Bell adopted a conservative design that resembled a child’s toy glider with thick, mid-mounted straight wings, tricycle landing gear and two underslung General Electric I-A jet engines 1,400 pounds of thrust each.
In March 1942, project officers for the top secret program selected a site along the north shore of Rogers Dry Lake, Calif., for flight tests. That summer, facilities for a small U.S. Materiel Center Test Base were constructed at the site. The project was given the highest priority, so work proceeded rapidly.
***image2***At the same time, the XP-59A became the first of the “black projects,” as wartime security demands by the British and American governments wrapped the XP-59A in the kind of deception that became a model for later programs.
The designation XP-59A suggested it was a development of a completely unrelated,
canceled Bell XP-59 fighter project and jet aircraft was so secret the AAF would not allow a large scale model to be tested in a wind tunnel. On Sept. 12, 1942, the first XP-59A arrived at Muroc for testing, fitted with a dummy propeller to disguise that it was America’s first jet.
The XP-59 became airborne several times during high-speed taxiing tests Oct. 1, but the first official flight was made the next day. That flight proved to be the high point of the program. The turbojets weighed 850 pounds, far too heavy for the 1,400 pounds of thrust they produced, and they had the standard early jet engine problems, including internal temperatures so hot that the turbine blades regularly overheated and broke off with catastrophic results.
These problems showed the wisdom of choosing Muroc as the test site for the XP-59 whose regular engine failures made close proximity to a landing field for dead-stick landings a blessing. With miles and miles of available dry lake to land on around Muroc, the entire test program was conducted without a single serious mishap.
The engine problems were common to all early turbojets, but the Airacomet also had poor lateral stability and, worst of all, generally poor performance because of its un-
imaginative design. Overweight and underpowered, its top speed was about 50 mph less than the prop-driven fighters of the day, and when it was flown in mock combat against P-38s, P-47s and P-51s, it was outclassed in virtually every category.
The service test YP-59As had more powerful engines but the improvement in performance was negligible. A YP-59A was supplied to the RAF in exchange for a Gloster Meteor, but British pilots found that the Airacomet compared very unfavorably to their jets. Two YP-59As were delivered to the U.S. Navy where they were found to be completely unsuitable for carrier operations.
In the end, 50 production models were built – 20 P-59As and 30 P-59Bs – armed with one 37-millimeter M4 cannon and three .50-caliber machine guns. The P-59s were assigned to the 412th Fighter Group and were used to train America’s first cadre of jet pilots with the handling and performance characteristics of jet aircraft. There was also another fringe benefit of the XP-59 program – the Muroc test facility went on to become Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
