As I'm sure some of our British members will know, the Bell X-1 was pretty much a rip-off of the Miles M.52.
Air Ministry specifications called for an aeroplane capable of flying more than twice as fast as any existing aircraft. At the time, no aeroplane had ever exceeded the sound barrier though there were unconfirmed reports of Spitfires and Mustangs going through the sound barrier in steep dives1.
Dubbed the Miles M.52, the secret aircraft would be designed for a speed of 1,000mph, with the ability to climb to 36,000 feet in 1.5 minutes.
In 1946 a team of American engineers from Bell Aviation visited the top-secret research facility of the Miles Aircraft company. The British government instructed the company to co-operate fully with the Americans, in return for data on the United States' own supersonic programme.
It is known that the Bell company had been having serious problems with control of their aircraft as it approached the sound barrier. The Miles team had overcome this snag with a completely new idea - the all-flying tailplane.
Basically, up until then, the horizontal tailplanes of all aircraft had been fitted with small flaps on their trailing edges to aid with vertical stability. The all-flying tailplane did away with these flaps, which were just not large enough to counteract the enormous forces encountered at supersonic speeds, and designed an aircraft where the entire horizontal tailplane pivoted, thus giving a much greater movable surface area with which to control the vertical pitch of the aircraft. This was a significant breakthrough, in fact Chuck Yeager is on record as saying that the single most significant contribution to the final success of the Bell XS-1 was the all-flying tailplane.
Within a few weeks of the American's visit, the Air Ministry Director of Scientific Research, Sir Ben Lockspeiser, cancelled the British supersonic project, saying:
...in view of the unknown hazards near the speed of sound ... [it is] considered unwise to proceed with the full-scale experiments.
Despite 90% of the design work being completed and half of the construction finished, the project fell, apparently due to a Treasury savings measure.
The Air Ministry ordered Miles to break up all jigs6 and to send all their design data to Bell Aviation. As it seems likely that the M.52 would have been flying by the summer of 1946, and since it would most likely have achieved its specified performance, it is hard not to believe the British government was pressured by the Americans to cancel the M.52 project.
This allowed the US become the first 'through the barrier', in October 1947, using the rocket-powered M.52 lookalike, the Bell XS-1. As an added bonus, the Americans' first jet engine, the General Electric Type 1, drew heavily on the designs of the British jet.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A882272
The Americans refused to give the British their designs (as per the agreement) and hastily modified the X-1 to include the tailplane.
I've only known about this for a while and was shocked to see that the wikipedia page on the Bell X-1 (and many others, for that matter) does not include even a small note that the all moving tailplane was in fact a British design - first tested on a Miles Falcon in 1943.
Now what really gets to me, is that I've been trying to add in a small note on the wikipedia page just mentioning that the all-moving tailplane (surely a particularly important development in supersonic design?) was a design by the Miles team. That's fair, right? Surely people should get recognition for their work?
