Constellation Commentary

Spanning an Era

Like its Douglas rivals, the Lockheed Constellation, from its first military Model C-69 to its ultimate development, the Model 1649A, was truly representative of the entire genera­tion of four-piston-engined airliners that dominated the airline scene for a dozen years after the Second World War. They had their troubles and the turbo-compound engines in the later models were a continual problem. Pan American once flew a Connie from New York to Burbank on three engines, just to change the fourth. T. W.A. kept an engine­carrying airplane in Paris for several years to service the frequent replacement needs in Europe and beyond (see page 56). But, supported energetically by T. W.A. throughout its life-span, Lockheed kept pace with technological progress, and was often the front-runner. The 1649A Starliner, or “Jetstream Starliner”, was the ultimate long-range piston – engined airliner. One version, the turboprop Model 1249A never went into service, but with a speed of 440 mph, could claim to be the fastest propeller-driven airliner ever built.

Distinguished Company

One claim for the record books, if not fame, was of an inci­dent in 1944, soon after Hughes and Frye had presented the C-69 to the Washington hierarchy. It had been flown to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, the home of the Wright brothers. Orville Wright was invited to take a ride. Not only that, he spent half an hour in the pilot’s seat, thus giving the Constellation the honor of being the only com­mercial airliner to have been flown by the pioneer of flight, who first took to the air on 7 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk. North Carolina.

Constellation Models

Elegant Development

The curvaceous Connies were always a picture of elegance, even though the engineers preferred the relative simplicity of the parallel-fuselage Douglas DC-6Bs. Its performance, in speed and range, could not be surpassed. Each stage of devel­opment, with increased engine power, increased tankage, and increased all-up weight: all these permitted higher payloads, longer range, and modest increases in speed. These resulted, for T. W.A., the claim to have flown the first non-stop transcontinental scheduled service, and later, the first non­stop trans-Atlantic service on a regular and sustained basis.

The Memory

Along with the Douglas DC-7C “Seven Seas,” the 1649A began to bow out when the Bristol Britannia “Whispering Giant” came on the scene in 1957. It was bigger, smoother, and faster than any of the Constellations. Howard Hughes would have bought 20 Britannias, had he known about them sooner, and if Bristol had been able to deliver them at short notice. But the death-knell was the arrival of the jet airliners. The harbinger was the ill-fated Comet 1 in 1952-54, then the Comet 4 and the dominating Boeing 707 in October 1958. All the piston-engined propeller airliners disappeared from the world’s main air routes in an extraordinarily short time. Pan American, especially, covered the globe, and all the U. S. air­lines brought the jets into service very quickly.

But the memory remains. The Save-a-Connie Airline History Museum at Kansas City (formerly known as the Save-a-Connie Foundation) volunteer organization preserves that memory with a beautifully-restored 1049H, which is kept in flying condition, more than four decades after it was first built (see picture, page 58)

Global Affiliations

The Lockheed Constellation created an airliner dynasty. Its operational life with T. W.A. also coincided with a period during which the airline, under Hughes’s enterprising leader­ship, and Jack Frye’s and Ralph Damon’s presidencies, aspired to challenge the incumbent international Chosen Instrument, the great Pan American Airways. Pan Am’s leader, Juan Trippe, was almost omnipotent, but Howard Hughes was a worthy opponent. In addition to the technical and operational irritants with which T. W.A. Constellations constantly provoked Pan Am’s Douglases, Hughes and Frye—taking a leaf out of Trippe’s own book—expanded their operational territory and influence by either buying into, or assisting in operational and managerial support of quite a number of foreign airlines. Interestingly, the benefits for T. W.A. during those exploratory years appear to have been an early example of shareholding interests, quasi-alliances, and code-sharing agreements that are with us today.