Larry Bell and his older brother, Grover, started out as mechanics in 1912. Grover was killed in a plane crash the following year. Larry was going to quit aviation for good. He became Martin’s shop foreman at age twenty and later the company’s general manager, wanting to be a partner. He was the founder of the Bell Aircraft Corporation in 1935; they built several types of fighter aircraft for WWII. The most famous aircraft was the X-1, the first supersonic aircraft. They developed and produced many important civilian and military helicopters. Bell also developed the reaction control system for the North American X-15 and the Bell Rocket Belt. The company was purchased in 1960 by Textron and lives on today as Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth, …show more content…
Another cancellation that really hurt was the Navaho intercontinental cruise missile program. North America Aviation built the first Little Joe boosters used to test the escape system for the Mercury spacecraft, the X-15 rocket plane, and the XB-70, as well as Apollo command and service module, the second stage of the Saturn V rocket, the Space Shuttle orbiter, and the B-1 Lancer. Through a series of mergers and sales, North American Aviation merged with Rockwell International in 1967. In 1996, Boeing acquired the NAA division from Rockwell …show more content…
As the airports were getting busier, it became obvious that the pilots needed more information regarding the runway in use, weather, and the surface wind. In 1920, he started his career at the St. Louis airport and provided this information to the pilots. He had a chair at the runway threshold, and he had a set of flags for the airplanes that did not have a radio.
In America, air traffic control (ATC) developed three divisions. The airmail radio station (AMRS) was created in 1922, after WWI when the US Post Office began using techniques developed by the army to direct and track the movements of reconnaissance aircraft. Over time, the AMRS became the flight service station (FSS). They did not issue control instructions but provided the pilots with many other flight-related informational services. They relayed control instructions from air traffic controllers in areas where flight service is the only facility with radio or telephone coverage. As new technology developed, they were able to combine the FSSs into automated flight service stations (AFSSs); they are now contracted out to Lockheed Martin