The gallery above reproduces an October 1949 report outlining the uses and requirements for the Supersonic Naval Ordnance Research Track (Project SNORT), a facility proposed for the Naval Ordnance Test Station located at Inyokern, California. This would be a straight railway 11 miles long, on which rocket-propelled vehicles would carry various kinds of test items at speeds reaching into [...]
In 1928, Olof Ljungstrom of Detroit, Michigan submitted a pair of unusual aircraft proposals to NACA which featured boundary layer removal via a primitive form of jet engine, in which a piston engine drove an axial flow turbine blower inside the aircraft. The power plant is reminiscent of that used by the Caproni Campini N.1, [...]
Return to Thumbnails The image gallery above features selected color artwork and photos taken from the Bell Aircraft Corporation Twenty-First Annual Report of 1956. This report was found in BuAer files and likely accompanied Bell’s D188 VTOL fighter proposal. It was illustrated with a few artist’s impressions of VTOL aircraft projects of the period, along [...]
Return to Thumbnails The document featured in the image gallery above was submitted by Bell Aircraft Corporation to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) in 1955 in connection with the company’s efforts to land a contract for a VTOL fighter, which it ultimately did with its D188/D188A designs of late 1956. Titled simply as “VTOL: [...]
Return to Thumbnails On October 5, 1955, R.J. Woods, an Airplane Design Consultant at Bell Aircraft Corporation, submitted 90 copies of a draft outline of a new “Proposed Supersonic Research Test Aircraft” to John W. Crowley, Associate Director for Research at NACA. Woods had presented this proposal at a conference at NACA Headquarters the previous [...]
