engine that was later to be produced by GE as the
General Electric J31 Major General
Henry H. "Hap" Arnold became aware of the UK's jet program when he attended a
taxiing demonstration of the
Gloster E.28/39 in April 1941. The subject had been mentioned, but not in-depth, as part of the
Tizard Mission the previous year. He requested and was given, the plans for the aircraft's powerplant, the
Power Jets W.1, which he took back to the U.S. He also arranged for an example of the engine, the Whittle W.1X turbojet, to be flown to the U.S. on 1 October in a
Consolidated B-24 Liberator, along with drawings for the more powerful
W.2B/23 engine and a small team of
Power Jets engineers. On 4 September, he offered the U.S. company
General Electric a contract to produce an American version of the engine, which subsequently became the
General Electric I-A. On the following day, he approached
Lawrence Dale Bell, head of Bell Aircraft Corporation, to build a fighter to utilize it. Bell agreed and set to work on producing three prototypes. As a
disinformation tactic, the USAAF gave the project the designation P-59A, to suggest it was a development of the unrelated
Bell XP-59 fighter project which had been canceled. The design was finalized on 9 January 1942, and construction began. In March, long before the
prototypes were completed, an order for 13 YP-59A pre-production aircraft was added to the contract. The P-59A had an oval cross-section, all-metal
stressed skin semi-
monocoque fuselage that housed a single pressurized
cockpit. The mid-mounted, straight wing had two
spars plus a false spar in the inner panel. The electrically powered
tricycle landing gear was attached to the center spar. The pair of
General Electric J31 turbojets were positioned under the
wing roots in streamlined
nacelles. The armament was located in the nose of the aircraft; two of the three XP-59As and most of the YP-59As had a pair of
M10 autocannon. Later aircraft, including the production models, had one M10 autocannon and three
AN/M2 Browning heavy machine guns. The aircraft carried a total of of fuel in four
self-sealing tanks in the inner wing panels. Both production models could carry
drop tanks under the wings. In addition, the P-59B was provided with a fuel tank in each outer wing panel. The crated prototype had been built on the second floor of a disused
Trico Plant 2 factory, but its components were too big to fit through any
elevator and required a hole to be broken in the brick outer wall to remove the first XP-59A. It was shipped to Muroc Army Air Field (today,
Edwards Air Force Base) in California on 12 September 1942 by train for
flight testing. The aircraft first became airborne during high-speed
taxiing tests on 1 October with Bell test pilot
Robert Stanley at the controls, although the first official flight was made by
Colonel Laurence Craigie the next day. While being handled on the ground, the aircraft was fitted with a dummy
propeller to disguise its true nature. When heavy rains flooded
Rogers Dry Lake at Muroc in March 1943, the second prototype was towed to
Hawes Field, an auxiliary airfield of Victorville Army Airfield, later
George Air Force Base, over a public road. After one flight on 11 March, security concerns caused the jet to be transferred to nearby
Harper Lake where it remained until 7 April. Five of the Airacomets, a pair of XP-59As, two YP-59As, and a P-59B had open-air flight observer cockpits (similar to those of
biplanes) fitted in the nose with a small
windscreen, replacing the armament bay. The XP-59As were used for flight demonstrations and testing, but one of the latter pair was used as a "
mother ship" for the other modified YP-59A during
remote control trials in late 1944 and early 1945. After the
drone crashed during take-off on 23 March, a P-59B was modified to serve as its replacement. During diving trials in 1944, one YP-59A was forced to make a
belly landing and another crashed when its entire
empennage broke away. Over the following months, tests on the prototypes and pre-production P-59s revealed a multitude of problems including poor engine response and reliability (common shortcomings of all early turbojets), poor
lateral and
directional stability at speeds over , so that it tended to "snake" and was a poor gunnery platform. The performance was greatly hampered by the insufficient thrust from its engines that was far below expectations. The Army Air Force conducted combat trials against propeller-driven
Lockheed P-38J Lightning and
Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighters in February 1944 and found that the older aircraft outperformed the jet. It, therefore, decided that the P-59 was best suited as a training aircraft to familiarize pilots with jet-engine aircraft. Even as deliveries of the YP-59As began in July 1943, the USAAF had placed a preliminary order for 100 production machines as the P-59A Airacomet, the name having been chosen by Bell employees. This was confirmed on 11 March 1944 but was later cut to 50 aircraft on 10 October after the procurement bureaucracy had digested the earlier evaluation. ==Operational service==