"Birth of the Cobra" Topic

Origin story of the AH-1:
link

Tried to read, page kept randomly advancing to the comment section. After six attempts to find my place in the article, when it bounced to the bottom again, I gave up.

Similar. I read maybe half of it. Like the article, bouncing around is just to annoying

I think it's a javascript error, I have NoScript running and I could read the article fine. Just couldn't read the comments.

What was on Mike Folse's drawing board at Bell Helicopter that day in March 1965 was supposed to be a hovercraft. It wasn't. "I had an idea instead," he explains. "My boss would be on vacation for two weeks."

Gloom pervaded Bell's Preliminary Design Group. In a Pentagon competition to develop an ambitious concept for an attack helicopter, Bell's proposal had just lost out to Lockheed's—a demoralizing beat-down from an airplane company that had never made a helicopter. At Bell's Hurst, Texas plant, an exodus was under way as dispirited engineers and executives started burning up accrued vacation time. On his way out the door, Folse's boss issued explicit instructions: "Forget what you're working on. While I'm gone, start on a hovercraft."

The youngest design engineer ever hired at Bell, Folse climbed the ladder in the 1950s, working on projects ranging from the "goldfish bowl" Model 47 light helicopter, for which he was a flight test engineer, to designing airframe components for the UH-1 "Huey"—the most-produced U.S. military helicopter in history—to development of the 206 JetRanger.

Now among a skeleton staff in the design group that March, Folse took out a sheet of vellum paper and began rendering the sleek outlines of what would become the Bell AH-1 Cobra, the world's first production attack helicopter. Designed, built, and deployed to the battlefield in just over two years from that day, the Cobra at last gave the rotary-wing genre a combat game-changer, purpose-built for offense.

And man, I didn't realize that Bell played the 'this is totally just another UH1 model' card that hard. (I know I'd buy a Cobra if I won the lottery!)