The Bell HSL was to be the answer in 1950 to a major Navy requirement - find and kill Russian submarines. It was a major step forward in size and lift for a helicopter. Its development problems behind it and on the eve of a critical milestone, delivery for the fleet introduction program, one crashed, killing the Navy's program manager and subsequently the program itself. Its legacy is the Bell Helicopter plant in Fort Worth, built specifically to produce the HSL.
This was my second monograph for Ginter Books. I was working for Bell Helicopter at the time and had access to a wealth of material on the program, not to mention some of the test pilots and engineers on the program. As a result, I subsequently found very little to add to the text or photos. One was a more nuanced explanation of the cause of the fatal crash. The other was a few days ago, the discovery of a photo in my files that came from Ray Wilhite five years ago:
I didn't make an effort at the time to understand why it was overall color other than blue like every other HSL, assuming that this one was assigned to the Navy training
command (the back of the official
Navy photo: 25 June 1958, HT-8 Ellyson Field, Pensacola) and was therefor overall orange/yellow. This time, down
the rabbit hole I went.
BuNo
129864 was completed in April 1956. Although all Navy helicopters except those used in
training were now to be
painted nonspecular Light Gull Gray overall as directed in February 1955, as far as I know all the HSLs were painted overall blue per the existing contract. It was delivered to Norfolk for storage and subsequently transferred to Jacksonville in August 1957. It was transferred to
MINEDEFDEVU (aka NAMDDU), Panama City, Florida on 13 January1958, I had assumed that it was at Jax for modification to the mine-sweeping configuration like several other HSLs. It was stricken at Panama City on 4 May 1959 (all surviving HSLs were formally stricken then, give or
take a month).
Like every other HSL picture that I've seen, the HSLs used for mine-sweeping development were blue.
Moreover, they all had the exterior mine-sweeping features: the added
oil-system components on the top of the fuselage (when sweeping, the HSL
was about 30-40 degrees nose down at maximum power for an extended
time), airframe-mounted inflatable flotation bags, and the big tow bar
under the aft fuselage. Some, if not all, also had the Bell build number on the fin:
e.g. 30 and 50 along with NAMDDU and PANAMACITYFLA and not the last four
digits of the BuNo as was the requirement at the time.
In this picture, 129864 does not have any of the mine-sweeping features. In
fact, it has the torpedo/depth charge pylons and a rescue hoist that
were standard on the production HSLs. It is
prominently marked with the last four digits of the BuNo, a practice
initiated in March 1955.
My
conclusion is that when 129864 was at Jacksonville before assignment to
NAMDDU, it was not converted to the mine-sweeping configuration.
Whatever else was done, it was repainted overall light gull gray and
remarked in accordance with the directives then in force at the time and
then presumably utilized by NAMDDU for requirements like
rescue, chase, training/proficiency, etc. as well as being a squadron hack, explaining its presence at Pensacola.
