Not your father’s helicopters. Bell goes high-tech with its new Fort Worth facility
Fort Worth-based Bell Textron Inc. is expanding its presence in North Texas, as the company pivots toward building aircraft with far more technology than the helicopters of yesteryear.
The company, which for decades has operated its headquarters not far from the Trinity River along the Fort Worth-Hurst border, has announced plans to build a new 140,000 Manufacturing Technology Center. The expansion will take place at a new Bell facility in far north Fort Worth, about 20 minutes from the headquarters.
The new technology center will be housed at an existing industrial/warehousing building at 5041 Sandshell Drive, near the northeast quadrant of Interstate 35W and NE Loop 820. Bell hopes to open the facility, which on the inside is roughly the size of a supermarket, in early 2021.
The tech center will help Bell make the transition from the research and design of new aircraft to full production, said Glenn Isbell, Bell vice president of rapid prototyping and manufacturing innovation.
The company is working with Lockheed Martin on the V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft built for the U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift program. Bell also has the 360 Invictus, a proposed helicopter design for the military’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program.
The tech center also could be a place for research on future generations of flying vehicles, including drones and other unmanned aircraft, Isbell said.
“We can use it as a proving ground,” Isbell said in a phone interview. “There’s a discovery element in that space, but there is also a focus on getting it into production. We can develop the actual manufacturing process we will use in production. A lot of times we struggle in the industry with going from building one aircraft, in a prototyping kind of way, to full production.”
Bell officials didn’t disclose a construction price for the tech center, or whether the facility would generate additional jobs at the company.
No tax breaks or other incentives were included by Fort Worth economic development officials to persuade Bell to make the expansion move to far north Fort Worth. However, city officials did help with rezoning the property to suit Bell’s needs, said Robert Sturns, Fort Worth economic development director.
The tech center also will feature integrated computer software that will monitor and control Internet connections, cybersecurity and all movement of people and goods in the building.
The company was founded by Lawrence Dale Bell in 1935, as Bell Aircraft Corp. in Buffalo, N.Y.
Bell moved the company to northeast Fort Worth in 1951. Many of the company’s aircraft have taken their first flights in North Texas.
L.D. Bell High School, in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district, is named after Bell.
Bell is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Textron Inc., a multi-industry company that also includes Cessna and Beechcraft airplanes, as well as E-Z-GO golf carts and Arctic Cat snowmobiles and many other products.
