Former Bell Aircraft Factory

The Bell Aircraft Corporation was founded in 1935 by Lawrence Bell, a one-time shop employee and general manager for the Glenn L. Martin and Consolidated Aircraft companies when they were located in the Buffalo, New York area. After Martin shifted their operations to San Diego and Consolidated moved into Buffalo proper, Bell founded Bell aircraft at this location at Niagara Falls Airport.

Finding only limited success with his early designs, in 1939 Bell designed and sold a single engine interceptor aircraft to the US Army Air Corps, named the P-39 Airacobra. Though the aircraft failed to live up to its high-performance interceptor billing, it proved to be a lethal close air support aircraft and low altitude dogfighter, seeing combat in every theatre of World War Two. Used heavily by American and Russian forces, the P-39 also served with the air forces of England, Australia, the Free French and Allied Italy. Finding its greatest success in the Soviet theatre, the P-39 was attributed to scoring highest number of individual kills of any U.S. fighter type supplied to the Soviets during the war, with some 4,719 aircraft sent to the Soviet Air Force. In total, 9,558 P-39's were built at this location between 1941 and 1944 when production ceased in favor of the upgraded P-63 Kingcobra, which saw 3,303 of its type built here for the Soviet Air Force before war's end in September 1945.

Prior to the end of hostilities, Bell had already begun work on a highly classified aircraft design at the Niagara Falls factory; the P-59 Airacomet. Utilizing existing design and data from Bell's previous aircraft, the P-59 would become the United States' first jet-powered aircraft, taking its first flight in October 1942 at the present-day Edwards Air Force Base. Though the design was eventually passed over due to performance problems with the early turbojets, Bell had begun a major change in US aircraft design and performance philosophy as the days of piston engine, propeller driven fighter aircraft were numbered.

Continuing to operate on the very tip of the rapidly advancing technological race through the 1940's and 1950's, Bell secured its place in aviation history once again on October 14th, 1947 when their bullet-shaped X-1 rocket craft broke the Sound Barrier over the Southern California desert. The follow-up X-2 design tested the limits of swept-wing aircraft design, being the first aircraft to exceed both Mach 3.0 and climb over 100,000ft in altitude. Bell's X-5 aircraft was the first plane to ever change the sweep of its wings in flight during tests in the early 1950's, advancements which would later lead to the development of the F-14 Tomcat, B-1 Bomber and F-111 Aardvark.

Bell Aircraft changed names to Bell Aerospace in the 1950's to match its role in America's fledgling space program, and though its experimental jet designs were pushing the limits of powered flight, the company continued to work with piston powered aircraft, designing and building 668 B-29 Superfortress' at its Marietta, GA plant. Through the 1940's and 50's Bell continued to produce new fighter designs in the hopes of securing long-term Government contracts, however Bell found less and less success in this field. Staking a large amount of capital into the US Space program, Bell was selected to design the Reaction Control System for the Project Mercury Spacecraft, again playing its part in a first for the United States when the Mercury-6 mission put John Glenn in orbit in 1962. However, by this point Bell Aircraft had undergone massive organizational changes; with Lawrence Bell's death in 1957 and the lack of large government contracts to check the financial investment into Project Mercury, the company found itself in dire financial straits by the end of the 1950's.

Bell's successor chose to retool the company to produce another airframe type it had been working on since 1941, but with limited success to date; the helicopter. While the company was in the process of redirecting its efforts, it was purchased by Textron Industries in 1960 which provided funding and stability for the helicopter program. Again renamed Bell Helicopter, the company continued to produce a variety of cutting edge helicopter designs at their Buffalo location, most notably the H-13 Sioux and early UH-1 Huey models.

Despite the stability the Textron merger brought to Bell as a whole, the new owners elected to utilize more modernized facilities in more economically and atmospherically favorable areas, namely the South. With all helicopter design, evaluation and building being transferred to Fort Worth, TX in 1976, Bell's operations at Niagara Falls airport ceased after 41 years. Today, a portion of the plant remains active and in use by Lockheed, however the majority of the old plant is idle.

www.bellhelicopter.com/en/
 place with historical importanceabandoned / shut downaircraft manufacturer
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Aircraft
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:  43°6'12"N 78°55'54"W

Comments

  • In addition to Lockheed operating a portion of the old Bell facility, maintaining the gravity gradiometers invented by Bell, MOOG-ISP (In Space Propulsion), continues to design and manufacture rocket engines used extensively in both the commercial and military Satellite and missile defense industries. If you would like more details, I can be reached at fpenque@gmail.com
  • So are you saying Moog ISP is Bell aircraft years later? I believe Bell Aviation is still in buisness today and was never aquired by Moog.
  • I was a Rocket technician in 1967. Got my A&P At burguard Vocational PostGrad after viet nam.retired ATP I enjoyed the Agena Rocket engine 5 15 sec test runs. I later worked At AVCO In Stratford ,CT in Flight Test with Rudy Optiz ( operation paper Clip )
  • Aturbojetpiolet..Did you ever with a person named John Salvage ?
  • My Dad was a engineer at Bell. I grew up in Buffalo and also graduated from Burgard. Did you happen to know George Strasser
  • The description gets a lot wrong. The Glenn L. Martin Company was never located anywhere near Buffalo; the company was originally located in Cleveland before it relocated to Baltimore. In the 1920s Larry Bell worked for Martin, but in 1928 he left the company to join Consolidated Aircraft in Buffalo, eventually becoming vice president and general manager. When Consolidated relocated to San Diego in 1935, Bell stayed in Buffalo and founded his own companym Bell Aircraft Corporation, on July 10 of that year.
  • Also, the original Bell plant and headquarters were in the city of Buffalo, at 2050 Elmwood Avenue, the former headquarters of Consolidated. Incidentally, that factory complex was built during World War I for the Curtiss Aeroplane Co., and was claimed to be the largest aircraft factory in the world at that time. About half, perhaps two-thirds, of that complex still stands today. In any case, in 1941-2, the government built Bell Plant 2 in Wheatfield, and the company transferred its headquarters there during this time. During the postwar drawdown, the aged Elmwood Avenue plant was sold, and Bell consolidated all operations at Niagara Falls/Wheatfield.
  • Finally, the P-59, America' first jet-powered aircraft, was neither designed not built in the Wheatfield plant. Chief of the Army Air Forces Henry "Hap" Arnold was a notorious stickler for secrecy, and demanded that the top-secret project be kept separate from Bell's main operations on Elmwood Avenue and in Wheatfield. Bell therefore leased a floor of an old Ford automobile plant in Buffalo (and later, apparently, the entire building) to house the jet project. It was said that the entire building was locked-down under heavy security, all windows were blacked-out. Engineers even had to knock a large hole in the basement wall of the building to gain access to the below-grade railway that ran past the complex, so that the P-59, complete with a fake propeller affixed to the nose, could be discretely transferred to railcar for its journey to Muroc Army Air Field (today, Edwards Air Force Base) in California. The birthplace of the P-59 still exists, today known as the ‘Tri-Main’ building on Main Street in Buffalo, between Jewett and Rodney Avenues. Incidentally, the complex was first built for Ford Motor Company in 1910–1915, and is one of the company’s first prominent production facilities outside Detroit, and also one of the first of the handful of locations that the Model T was manufactured. The factory was designed by prodigious industrial architect Albert Kahn, who was Henry Ford’s favored architect, and is an exemplar of early daylight factory design.
  • As I understand, Moog, Inc. was started in the 1950s by Bill Moog, a former employee of Curtiss-Wright, which was also headquartered in Buffalo. So there is likely little or no connection between Bell and Moog—although I'm sure there's been a lot of collaboration, especially since they were both involved in the same industries and both were located in metro Buffalo (Moog is still in East Aurora, a suburb of Buffalo).
  • Bell is still in business today (http://bellhelicopter.com). As per the article above, it was acquired by Textron in 1960, and remains a subsidiary of that company (http://www.textron.com/about/our-businesses/).
  • Moog now occupies part of the original Bell Aircraft plant
  • No, I'm saying Moog purchased what used to be the Bell rocket propulsion division of Bell Aircraft/Aerosystems/Aerospace, and it is operating to this day.
  • Actually, Bell used Moog valves on many of the the rocket engines it produced throughout time.
  • was there a Bell aircraft factory in Iceland during WWII?
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This article was last modified 11 years ago