Every so often aviation history throws up an aircraft whose greatest achievement was simply existing. The Bell P-59 Airacomet is the patron saint of that club. It was America’s first jet aircraft, a genuine milestone, and yet it was so underwhelming in the air that the US Army Air Forces looked at it, sighed, and quietly decided it would make a lovely trainer. This is the story of a plane that mattered enormously precisely because it did not work very well.

It also happens to be one of the few fighters that once hid in plain sight behind a wooden propeller it did not need.

A secret brought home in a general’s head

The tale begins in April 1941, when the chief of the US Army Air Corps, Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold, watched Britain’s little Gloster E.28/39 hop around an airfield with no propeller at all. Arnold knew immediately what he was looking at: the future. He talked the British into handing over the plans, and a complete example, of Frank Whittle’s revolutionary jet engine, on the single condition that the whole business be kept absolutely secret.

Back in the United States, Arnold handed the engine to General Electric, which had the turbine expertise to copy it, and the airframe job to Lawrence Bell, whose company could keep a secret and build fast. GE’s American version of the Whittle design became the I-A, and later the more powerful J31. Bell’s fighter would carry two of them, tucked into the wing roots. It was all so hush-hush that the project was deliberately mislabelled to look like a continuation of an old, cancelled, propeller-driven Bell design, the paperwork equivalent of hiding in plain sight.

The plane that wore a disguise

The secrecy went well beyond filing cabinets. The prototype was built behind windows welded shut and painted over, guarded around the clock. When it was crated and shipped by rail to the remote Muroc Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, one baffled railway man reportedly asked a GE engineer to “send me a telegram collect when the war’s over and tell me what’s in those crates.”

The best-loved detail, and the one that is entirely true, is the propeller. Whenever the jet was parked or towed in the open, ground crews bolted a dummy propeller onto its nose and slipped covers over the engine intakes and exhausts, so that any curious eyes would see nothing more exotic than an ordinary fighter. The most advanced aircraft in America was hiding behind a piece of shaped wood.

First flight, sort of

On 1 October 1942, Bell’s chief test pilot Robert M. Stanley began “high taxi” runs, roaring down the lakebed and lifting the aircraft a foot or two into the air before setting it back down. One of those hops turned into a genuine, if unplanned, flight, and just like that, an American jet had flown. The formal, ceremonial flights came the next day, when Colonel Laurence Craigie took a turn and became the first US military pilot to fly a jet.

There is a charming footnote here. Plane number one was soon fitted with a second seat and instrument panel ahead of the cockpit, which made the XP-59A the world’s first two-seat jet aircraft, and gave history its first jet passenger. The Airacomet was collecting “firsts” faster than it was collecting fans.

And then everyone actually flew it

This is where the milestone runs into the mathematics. The Airacomet flew, and it flew pleasantly; testers found it smooth, quiet and forgiving. What it did not do was perform. The early engines were sluggish and unreliable, thrust came in far below hopes, and above about 290 mph the aircraft tended to “snake” from side to side, which made it a poor gun platform.

The numbers tell the same story. Even the definitive P-59B topped out at roughly 413 mph. That was no faster, and in some conditions slower, than the piston-engined P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightnings already filling US squadrons, and it was in another league entirely from Germany’s Messerschmitt Me 262, built for well over 500 mph. In mock dogfights in early 1944, the propeller-driven veterans simply outflew the jet. America’s shiny new future had been beaten by its own present.

The verdict from the evaluation board was blunt, and it did not mince words about the aircraft’s combat prospects.

Failing upward

So the USAAF did the sensible thing. An order for 100 fighters was trimmed to 50, and the 66 Airacomets eventually built were handed not to combat squadrons but to America’s first jet unit, to teach pilots how a jet behaves. A couple went to the Navy, which found them hopeless for carrier work. One was even traded to Britain for a Gloster Meteor; British pilots, already flying better jets, were distinctly underwhelmed.

Here is the twist that redeems the whole affair. The P-59 was never going to be a war-winner, and it should not be remembered as one. Its real job turned out to be education. It gave American engineers, mechanics and pilots their first hands-on grounding in turbojets, and by the time the vastly superior Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star arrived, the US had already learned to think in jet. The official closing report got it exactly right: no combat aircraft came out of it, but the effort was “very worthwhile, since it proved that the principle of jet propulsion for aircraft was sound and practical.” The Airacomet was not the fighter America needed. It was the teacher America needed, and then it politely stepped aside. You do not scrap the aircraft that taught you to fly the future.

More on America’s first jet.

Sources: Wikipedia (Bell P-59 Airacomet); National Museum of the U.S. Air Force; HistoryNet / Aviation History (C.V. Glines); Vintage Aviation News; Smithsonian NASM.