The recently-reactivated English Electric Company Ltd. Developed the B-57 Canberra in response to a 1944 proposal by the British Ministry of Aircraft Production. The B-57’s first test flight took place in May 1949. At the time the US Air Force needed to replace its Douglas B-26. It selected the Canberra after it set an unofficial time record for crossing the Atlantic in February 1951. The event was also the first unrefueled crossing. The US-based Martin was selected to perform the manufacturing. The initial B57A was slightly redesigned to carry only one pilot and one engineer. It also now incorporated two 7200-pound thrust Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire engines, which were licensed to Wright Aeronautical and renamed the J65. The B57B, which first flew in June 1954, was an upgraded version of the B-57A that included armament, an improved bomb bay, and placement of the navigator behind the pilot. Over 200 of the B-57Bs were manufactured.
The Air Force’s 58th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron used B-57s in the 1960s to take high-altitude samples of the atmosphere in locations where nuclear testing was suspected. Due to structural damage to the wings the aircraft were largely retired by 1974. NASA’s Johnson Space Center operates the only two operating B-57s in existence today for high-altitude research.
Utilization at Glenn: Lewis initially acquired the B-57B in May 1965 for the groundbreaking Project Bee research. The project sought to prove that the high-energy liquid hydrogen could be used as aircraft fuel. The B-57B was setup to take off and land using traditional fuel, but switched over to the liquid hydrogen while in flight over Lake Erie. The tests were successful and would be a key element in convincing others in NASA that liquid hydrogen was safe to use on the Saturn rocket. In 1966 the B-57A was tied down on the hangar apron as Lewis engineers recorded the decibel and frequency levels of the J-65 engines. After conducting the initial recordings, research followed to construct quieter engines. In the 1960s Lewis established a standardized way to calibrate solar cells using the B-57A aircraft. The pilots would take the aircraft up into the troposphere and open the solar cell to the sunlight. The aircraft would quickly, but steadily descend while instruments recorded how much energy was being captured by the solar cell at different altitudes. From this data, researchers could determine the estimated power for a particular solar cell at any altitude.
