Lockheed Constellation
1943 airliner family
The Lockheed Constellation ("Connie") is a propeller-driven, four-engined airliner built by Lockheed Corporation starting in 1943. The Constellation series was the first civil airliner family to enter widespread use equipped with a pressurized cabin, enabling it to fly well above most bad weather, thus improving the general safety and ease of commercial passenger air travel.
Several models of the Constellation series were produced, all with the distinctive triple tail and dolphin-shaped fuselage. Most were powered by four 18-cylinder Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclones. In total, 856 were produced between 1943 and 1958 at Lockheed's plant in Burbank, California, and used as civil airliners and as a military and civilian cargo transports. They were notably used during the Berlin and the Biafran airlifts. Three served as the presidential aircraft for Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of which is at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
Design and development
Initial studies
Lockheed had been working on the L-044 Excalibur, a four-engined, pressurized airliner, since 1937. In 1939, Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA), at the instigation of major stockholder Howard Hughes, requested a 40-passenger transcontinental airliner with a range of 3,500 mi (5,600 km)—well beyond the capabilities of the Excalibur design. TWA's requirements led to the L-049 Constellation, designed by Lockheed engineers, including Kelly Johnson and Hall Hibbard.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lockheed Constellation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.