Word: airacuda
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Bell Aircraft's first break came in 1937 when it proudly announced the Airacuda, a freakish-looking, poor-flying bomber-fighter which got a burst of publicity but little else. Then came Bell's first success: the Airacobra, a flashy, 400-m.p.h., single-place fighter which has a cannon in its nose and climbs like an express elevator...
...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...
When "Rube" Fleet moved his company to San Diego in 1935, Larry Bell leased the old plant, raised $400,000 by stock sales in Buffalo and became president of Bell Aircraft Corp., with Robert J. Woods as his boss designer. While Woods was turning out the two-engined Airacuda, Bell Aircraft was making ends meet by subcontracting for other manufacturers; but by the time the Air Corps had bought 13 Airacudas, Larry Bell could see the Airacobra and a real manufacturing future ahead. Last week on Bell's books were Air Corps orders for 93 Airacobras, and its backlog...
...famed motor speedway, its engineers and craftsmen, working on small orders for the U. S. Army, have kept the spark of in-line design firing, are now ready to go places. Already powered by Allison V-12's is the Army's twin-motored fighter, the Airacuda. More recently, the 1,000-horsepower Allison was built into a modification of the Army's snub-nosed Curtiss P-36. The ship has a speed of 280 miles an hour with a 1,100-horsepower radial. Powered with an Allison engine with 100 less horsepower, the lancelike P37 gained...
...interchangeability of the two pilots, navigator and three gunners who are protected from the danger of fire by having the gasoline tanks removed entirely from the fuselage and placed in the huge wings where they may or may not prove a greater hazard. Heated and oxygenized, the Airacuda is a high altitude fighter designed to destroy the "Flying Fortress" type of big bomber, is equipped to drop small bombs to cripple bigger machines flying below...