The P-59 exists because of a transatlantic technology transfer. Britain had a working turbojet — Frank Whittle’s — and, courting American support in 1941, agreed to share it. A complete Whittle W.1X engine and drawings for the more powerful W.2B were flown to the United States, where General Electric at Lynn, Massachusetts, was chosen to reproduce them as the I-A. GE was picked precisely because its long experience with turbosuperchargers gave it the metallurgy and turbine know-how the job demanded.

Bell Aircraft, meanwhile, designed a conventional twin-engine airframe around two of these engines, buried in the wing roots either side of the fuselage. The result flew only thirteen months after the go-ahead — a remarkable pace — but it was fundamentally limited by engines that, even in their final form, produced only around 2,000 lb of thrust each. The airframe was never the problem; the young, low-thrust engines were.

One of the enduring images of the programme is the dummy propeller. When the secret prototype sat outside at Muroc Dry Lake, ground crews bolted a wooden four-blade propeller to its nose, so that from a distance it looked like a conventional piston fighter rather than the revolutionary jet it was. The story has become the symbol of just how tightly the whole project was guarded: mis-designated on paper, its engine disguised as a turbosupercharger, and its true nature literally masked on the flight line. The propeller was, of course, removed before every flight.

The Airacomet was a technical success and a tactical failure. Its engines, derived from an early British design, simply did not produce enough thrust: top speed hovered around 413 mph, no better than a good propeller fighter and well short of the 500-plus mph the German Me 262 and He 280 were built for. Worse, the engines accelerated slowly and the aircraft proved an unsteady platform for its guns. When the USAAF flew it against P-47D Thunderbolts and P-38J Lightnings in early 1944, the piston fighters won. A Materiel Command evaluation concluded the P-59 was not operationally or tactically suited for combat. Production was cut from hundreds to around 66, and the type was steered into the training role instead — where its docile handling and twin engines made it genuinely useful for turning propeller pilots into jet pilots.

The P-59 was a secret wartime development contract, not a catalogue purchase, so a clean flyaway unit price was never published in the way modern aircraft costs are. The programme began with a $1.6 million research-and-development contract in 1941, and total procurement was tiny — only around 66 aircraft ever built — which kept unit costs high by the standards of mass-produced fighters. Any precise dollar figure attached to an individual Airacomet should be read as an estimate.

No reliable cost-per-flight-hour figure exists for the type either. As a short-lived experimental and training aircraft that never entered squadron combat service, its operating economics were never recorded in a form comparable to later, mass-produced jets.