Out with a Flash

High above the California desert, a needle-nosed aircraft dropped from the belly of a B50 mother ship, kicked in its rocket engines and flashed up to 126,000 ft., higher than man had ever flown before. The plane was Bell Aircraft Co.'s X-2 research plane (see SCIENCE), and the news of its record-breaking flight was a farewell accolade to the man who built it. At 62, Bell President Lawrence Dale Bell, for 45 years a pioneering airman, announced that he was moving over to board chairman, leaving the operation of the company to his second in command, Vice President Leston P. Faneuf, 52.

Amusements & Airacomets. The X-2's flight made the kind of aviation history Larry Bell could appreciate. When he first started building flying machines in 1913 at the Glenn L. Martin Co., the firm was listed in the phone book under "Amusements." Working with such other aviation pioneers as Martin, Fred Rentschler and Donald Douglas Sr., Planemaker Bell helped change the joke into one of the world's greatest industries. By 1935 he had his own company in Buffalo.

Calm and brainy, Bell lost no time striking out into the fields he liked best--research and development. His first fighter plane in 1937 was a flying machine-gun nest ; it had twin engines, a 300-m.p.h. top speed, bristled with two 37-mm. cannon, four .50-cal. machine guns. No sooner was it aloft than Bell was busy with a radical single-engined fighter, the P-39. It was the first single-engined U.S. fighter with tricycle landing gear, had a 37-mm. cannon firing through the hollow prop hub. Expanding from 100 workers to 55,000 at five plants around the U.S. in World War II, Bell built 12,900 fighters (many of which were lend-leased to the Russians), and by 1944 was in production with another innovation, the Bell P-59 Airacomet, first U.S. jet fighter. But typically, Bell was losing interest in fighters. Said he: "They don't offer much challenge really; it's just an endless race to go ten miles an hour faster than somebody else."

"Larry's Folly." Though workers called the project "Larry's Folly," Bell's new interest was helicopters, because "you're like a bird--you can go anywhere you want." By 1946 Bell was in production with its first basic Model 47 helicopter, has since sold more than 1,000. Airman Bell also led the attack on the sound barrier with the stainless-steel, rocket-engined X-1, which blazed to a 967-m.p.h. speed record in 1948. Five years later Bell's improved X-1A topped 1,650 m.p.h. and a 90,000-ft. altitude (TIME, Aug. 22, 1955).

Yet Bell has never forgotten that his big job is turning a profit for stockholders. This year Bell will do some $200 million business (profit: more than $6,000,000) without making a single conventional plane. Instead, Bell has 94 military contracts, including its own Rascal air-to-ground guided missile.

For all his diversified success, Larry Bell has been easing up in the past few years. Partly the reason is Bell's health; he suffered a heart attack in 1953. But partly, too, he sees science taking over from the oldtime pioneers, both in the cockpit and in the plant. Says Bell: "A lot of the fun has gone out of it."

In able, energetic President Les Faneuf, who started as Bell's special assistant 13 years ago after a rainbow career as everything from commandant of a military academy to political editor of the Buffalo Times, Bell has the kind of imaginative, production-wise executive the company needs in order to grow. But, says Chairman Bell: "No matter where I am, when an airplane flies overhead, I'm going to go outside and look at it. I don't think I'll ever get over that."

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