[2] Young had experimented alone with helicopter designs using scale models, and in 1941 he approached the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York.

With the main Bell factories immersed in war production, and to ensure a research and development program that was sufficiently private and free of distractions, Young and his team moved to the Buffalo suburb of Gardenville (West Seneca).

The Ship 1 prototype's first serious mishap occurred near the very end of 1942 in captive testing, when a Bell corporate pilot asked to try the Ship 1, while not using a seat belt and hanging onto the controls instead to stay in the open cockpit - this captive flight attempt resulted in the rotor system "going through resonance" as designer Arthur Young had warned about, resulting in a "bucking" instability and accident which cracked the rotor blades loose and sent the pilot up into the disc of the rotor blades, luckily only breaking an arm.

[5] The Ship 1 prototype registration NX41860 had an open cockpit, an enclosed fuselage for the Franklin piston engine, and fixed three-wheel landing gear.

[2] The Model 30 Ship 1A, Genevieve, is now on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.