Word: airacobra
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...pursuit planes have been crowned with kudos for speeds they have not reached with military loads under service conditions. Most airmen knew last week that the Curtiss P-4O pursuit plane had a top of around 360 m.p.h., and that other Air Corps speedsters-the sleek Bell Airacobra (P-39), the twin-engined Lockheed interceptor (P-38)-were only crowding 400. They were not doing anything close to the 450 m.p.h. that many a layman thought they were...
Last week Aircraft Maker Lawrence (Airacobra) Bell showed newsmen his recently expanded factory in Buffalo. His guests inspected hundreds of gleaming, new machine tools, saw that Larry Bell had perhaps the finest aircraft plant in the U. S. They looked over a production line of some 30 Airacobras -all-metal, low-winged, single-engined pursuit planes designed to fly upwards of 400 m.p.h., climb phenomenally fast to intercept enemy bombers. And the visitors got a lesson in the status of U. S. defense...
...Airacobra was in service. Two were nearly finished. Three a day should be trundling off the production line for the U. S. Army and Navy within three months, five a day by next spring (plus additional planes for Great Britain). But Larry Bell last week had on hand only one of the 37-mm. cannon which fire through the Airacobra's nose. He had only one propeller designed for the cannon (which projects through a hole in the propeller hub). Worst of all he had only three liquid-cooled, in-line Allison engines...
Three U. S. fighting planes are built around the Allison engine: Bell's Airacobra; Curtiss-Wright's snappy P-4O (also made in Buffalo) ; Lockheed's twin-engined P-38. Curtiss-Wright last week had its P-4O production up to seven a day, for the moment had enough Allisons, but only because Bell and Lockheed did not yet need them in quantity. Both soon will; there will not be enough for all three for months. One or more will have to finish fuselages and wings, store them and wait for engines...
...Curtiss-Wright, $395,000,000 for Douglas, $373,000,000 for United Air craft, $218,000,000 for Lockheed. Backlogs of the smaller fry (called "marginal producers" less than a year ago) were scarcely less dizzying. Sample: 46-year-old Lawrence Doane Bell's Bell Aircraft (Airacuda, Airacobra), whose books bulge with $60,000,000 in orders, up from $7,500,000 last year...