Lockheed L-049 Constellation
US airliner with 4 piston engines, 1943
The Lockheed L-049 Constellation is the first model of the Lockheed Constellation aircraft line. It entered service as the C-69 military transport aircraft during World War II for the United States Army Air Forces and was the first civilian version after the war. When production ended in 1946 it was replaced by the improved L-649 and L-749 Constellation.
History
Design and development
In June 1939, Howard Hughes, the owner of Transcontinental & Western Air (later Trans World Airlines and abbreviated TWA), held a meeting at his Hancock Park residence in California. Jack Frye (then president of TWA) attended along with three executives from the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation which included designer Clarence "Kelly" Johnson. During the meeting Hughes expressed his concerns for what he called the "airliner of the future". Lockheed's airliner under development at the time, the L-044 Excalibur, did not meet the requirements.
When the meeting ended with Hughes and Frye, the executives immediately started on improving the Excalibur to meet Hughes' expectations. One idea was to use the Wright R-2600 engines in place of the proposed Wright GR-1820. It was decided instead to start from scratch using some original characteristics of the Excalibur.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lockheed L-049 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.