First Bell Helicopter: Model 30 Flight Tests 1944 Bell Aircraft Corporation

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The Model 30 Bell Helicopter. Three prototypes were built, leading to the development of the Model 47.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_30

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Bell 30 was the prototype for the first commercial helicopter, and the first helicopter built by the Bell Aircraft Company. Designed by Arthur M. Young, the type served as a demonstration testbed for the successful Bell 47...

Development

Young had experimented alone with helicopter designs using scale models, and in 1941 he approached the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York. The company agreed to build a number of full-scale prototypes, and Young moved to Buffalo. With the main Bell factories immersed in war production, and to ensure a research and development program that was sufficiently private and free of distractions, Young and his team moved to the Buffalo suburb of Gardenville (West Seneca). The Ship 1 prototype's first serious mishap occurred near the very end of 1942 in captive testing, when a Bell corporate pilot asked to try the Ship 1, while not using a seat belt and hanging onto the controls instead to stay in the open cockpit - this captive flight attempt resulted in the rotor system "going through resonance" as designer Arthur Young had warned about, resulting in a "bucking" instability and accident which cracked the rotor blades loose. The first free flight of Ship 1 was carried out on June 26, 1943, only the third American helicopter to fly.

The Ship 1 prototype registration NX41860 had an open cockpit, an enclosed fuselage for the Franklin piston engine, and fixed three-wheel landing gear. The engine drove a two-bladed main rotor and a two-bladed anti-torque tail rotor. The prototype crashed in September 1943 and was subsequently modified with several improvements, including an enclosed cabin for the pilot and passenger, who sat side by side in the cockpit. With all the lessons learned, the third prototype became the basis for the production model, the Bell Model 47. The Model 30 Ship 1A, Genevieve, is now on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum...