Among lovers of piston prop planes, the Lockheed Constellation inevitably has a special place, often right at the very top. If you’ve got the time, take a honeymoon vacation flight to the Golden State in 1952, and ride in a shiny new Packard convertible to see the sights of Hollywood, Los Angeles and other parts of the state.
You have to love that great flying experiences like this are still the norm. At least some things haven’t changed! 😉
One of the most beautiful aircraft ever to fly…
You sure got that right, Ed! There’s a Connie on display at the Udvar Hazy Museum at Dulles Airport. I go there and just stare at that beauty like it was a Van Gogh painting.
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Is there still one of these parked at the Van Nuys Airport ? .
I remember looking at it when I worked L.A.P.D. Air Support and rode my bicycle ’round the edges of the air field for exercise .
The Mechanics told me these drank fuel too much to every be flown again , more’s the pity .
-Nate
There was a later model that used to fly at Oshkosh regularly. Don’t know if it’s still being flown there or not.
During my teens and early twenties I used to fly between Boston and NYC on the Eastern Airlines Shuttle. Imagine (as a kid) going to the airport with no reservation, walking up to the gate without going through security, boarding a plane without a ticket, and, shortly after takeoff, having a flight attendant walk down the aisle with a cash register cart, take your $20 bill, and give you change back. During busy times, the Lockheed Electra they normally used for the hourly flights would fill up, so they’d wheel out my favorite, a slow, noisy, but somehow still elegant Super Constellation. Flying is such a pain these days…
Yep ;
I remember walking right up and flying away easy – peasy .
I remember the first time I flew on a ‘ Turbo Prop ‘ air craft , they made a big deal out of telling us it had propellers but had ‘! JET ENGINES ! ‘ running the props .
Good times, decent food back then too .
Standing of the roof of Logan Airport in Boston , watching the planes take off and land .
-Nate
I’m a Constellation fan so had to learn more about the one airplane I could identify (the first one).
TWA had ten early Super Constellation model 1049s – all introduced in 1952. This one is Lockheed construction number 4018, TWA fleet number 904 and carries registration N6904C. The fleet name is “Star of the Ganges”. It suffered failure of the two starboard engines and was substantially damaged in an emergency landing at NAS Fallon, Nevada in December 1952 but was repaired by Lockheed on site at Fallon. It was scrapped in the late ’60s in Miami.
The original ten 1049s are distinguished by no radome and no tip tanks – features seen on the much more prolific in the TWA fleet and later 1049G “Super G”.
The flight from LA to San Francisco was on an earlier Connie – a 049, 749 or 749A.
Very interesting – many thanks.
I was delighted to see one of these at the airport near the Grand Canyon a couple of months ago, a graceful mirage in the high desert, the eternally beautiful Connie…….
Speaking of the Grand Canyon & Connies-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Grand_Canyon_mid-air_collision
That was the event that eventually required positive radar contact throughout the entire flight.
Not sure about one being at Van Nuys in recent history, but there was one (a military EC-121 radar ship) at Camarillo until a few years ago. Happily, that one is being preserved. They actually few it out of Camarillo to Chino, I believe.
Ah, the sound of Wright R-3350 turbo-compounds!
A flying work of art. The National Airline History Museum in Kansas City has a gorgeous one, plus a Martin 404 and an L-1011.
I loved seeing these. I grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb close to the airport. The usual flight path for landing passed just to the north of my house, and I used to watch the planes come in. TWA had a major presence at Pittsburgh, so these Connies were quite a common site until the airline phased them out in 1966. I have never flown in one, but my grandparents flew back to the “old country” (Italy) for a visit in one in 1956.
Beautiful, beautiful shape. Two ‘memories’ for me. James Bond took a sleeping berth across the Atlantic in one of these in one of the Fleming books, probably Diamonds are Forever or Live and Let Die.
The second? Frank in a jaunty mood.
What about the Midland Sky Chief in “How To Marry A Millionaire”?
Amazing film. The constant stream of paradisiacal imagery of California became firmly implanted in my childhood brain. It all worked: in 1962, 10 years after this film was made, California surpassed New York to become the most populous state in the US. And 10 years later I arrived for graduate school and never left.
The Packard needs white wall tires but these would have been in short supply due to the Korean War. Love the little Rambler the newlyweds drove to Tijuana. More than air travel has changed!
A beautiful plane. Eisenhower’s presidential plane, the Columbine III, was a Lockheed Constellation:
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=568
A friend who is a curator at an aircraft museum recently observed the Connie was “the finest three engine aircraft ever to fly”. Apparently the reliability of the engine units wasn’t stellar. There’s a ex-USAF transport (maybe a Super?) flying locally, decked out in the contemporary Qantas livery. It’s an incredibly noisy beast, but very beautiful.
It had the same engines as the B-29, which was one reason why its introduction during WW2 was delayed: B-29s fell from the sky when its early R-3350s, made with magnesium, caught fire – burned through the main spar. Yet some 049s were used as wartime troop transports; these must’ve impressed the G.I.s.
This was also why Boeing’s test pilot was called upon to fly the Connie prototype, because of experience with those engines. He was impressed.
The last versions had “turbine-compound” engines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_R-3350_Duplex-Cyclone which were quite complicated and somewhat unreliable. These were also used on the Douglas DC-7 which prompted the joke that a DC-6 was a four engined three propeller blade aircraft while a DC-7 was a three engined four propeller blade aircraft.
Our next door neighbor when I was growing up was a TWA Flight Engineer. Endless stories about those Connie engines. They burned so much oil that a 70 gallon belly oil tank and transfer pumps were there for him to add oil to engines that would otherwise have to be shut down after going through the 40 gallons in each. Oh, and the Power Recovery Turbines of the turbo compound engine were nicknamed the “Parts Recovery Turbines” when the engines failed.
Once he upgraded to the 707, his workload was mostly just keeping the entertainment system (film projectors) working, the engines were so trouble free.
“All those tantalizing odors”… You got to choose your own fully cooked lobster. Civilized.
Here are my Larry King style, unrelated observations.
There’s a Connie at Greenwood lake airport in NJ that was flown in during the 1970s and was a lounge for a short time. When I saw it there about 25 years ago, it was being used for storage of furniture, but I read it’s now an administration office. A fuselage with changing cross section like that was not designed for high production, but it surely is pretty to look at. Before 707s were common, I would go out in our yard in Framingham, MA, on a summer Saturday afternoon, lie on my back in the grass and watch planes like that fly over at around 10,000 feet from Logan airport to points West. I think I have an MPC toy version somewhere. About 2” long, injection molded in yellow.
MPC also made tiny cars that your parents could buy in bags of 50 or so that had their brand names in raised letters on the rear deck. The Rambler was a convertible just like the one in this film, top down. Always thought it wasn’t a real convert as a kid , but love them now.
If you were a kid in the ’50s, that voice over guy, Art Gilmore was very familiar to you, or at least his disembodied voice was. He could transmit a lot of enthusiasm for the mundane.
The actor, Richard Carlson was a face you saw in B movies but didn’t have a name for. He may have made a radiation monster movie or two. Not so successful as to drive a Bentley…
Product placement right off the bat with the two beachgirls drinking Cokes. Or Pepsis? The bottles were pretty similar, and exhibit those anatomical lines from the art nouveau period that can be seen in the sweep of the Constellation.
Yes, Art Gilmore is certainly a familiar voice for those of us who grew up before a TV in the 50 and 60s – he was a member of the Jack Webb stock players club and served as narrator for may of Webb’s programs and also as a LT on the later Dragnet series in the 60s.
Was also nice to see an early Crown bus – another SoCal trademark.
As you mention, Richard Carlson fought the “Creature from the Black Lagoon”, and quite a few other 50s B-movie monsters. I believe his last screen appearance was on a soap opera in the early 70s.
And the Connie is just majestic – on the ground or in the air……..
Richard Carlson also appeared as the lead actor, portraying Herbert Philbrick, in the TV series “I Led Three Lives,” which aired from 1953-1956. It was one of my favorite shows as a child. He was often seen driving a ’54 Ford, if memory serves correctly.
The first and only time dad would ever fly was in a TWA Constellation! After Landis Corporation’s St. Louis plant shut down in 1958, the company that bought Landis flew him to Maine for a job. Dad was gone 2 weeks then came home. I don’t know the circumstances as I was only 7, but something about not wanting to move.
Earlier, when we moved to Jennings, MO (right next to Ferguson!), we lived just under the main approach to the St. Louis airport, Lambert Field, and those Connies, DC-3s, Electras and later all sorts of other aircraft made a lot of racket many times a day flying over our house!
One day, we were on a new section of I-70 and a Connie was coming in for a landing using the cross runway right over the highway – at street light level almost, and dad happened to be driving just as the Connie seemed to barely miss landing on the car roof! Thrilling, to say the least!
My favorite all-time airliner!
I was also fascinated watching the film last night. At one time, California indeed was the promised land and we were all taken in by the glamorous images, not to mention the music of the Beach Boys!
Finally, I did notice the Connie’s 4 engines were still running when it landed!
“I was also fascinated watching the film last night. At one time, California indeed was the promised land and we were all taken in by the glamorous images, not to mention the music of the Beach Boys!”
Zackman, you sure said it! I was 13 when the Beatles got big…never liked them but loved the Beach Boys sound and those lyrics about the golden land of sunshine and leisure on the west coast called California. Finally moved out there in 2000 but came back east 15 years later realizing that the dream of the idyllic life in California was over. Even the Beach Boys original house was gone…taken by the 105 Freeway.
As a kid we almost took a vacation to Disneyland after it opened in 1955. I remember so well reading the brochures …travel on a TWA Connie and see the TWA Spaceship in Tomorrowland. -all just a dream now.
It’s still pretty good out here .
I travel around America a fair bit and so far , I prefer to live here until I die .
When I arrived in 1969 it was dirt cheap to live here , those dayze are long gone .
-Nate
In my past life I spent a number of years at TWA doing a lot of things, among them video production. Our studios were at the administration building (KCAC) near Kansas City Airport (MCI). There were reels and reels of promotional films stored there, some on nitrate film (yikes!)
I think much of this was donated to the University of Missouri in St. Louis but I’m not sure what remains.
Pressed for time now, but I will post more later.
Neat travelogue! I immediately caught the 52 tabs on the 1951 California plates, so that Packard convertible was new. I saw a 1953 Chrysler in the San Francisco footage; if all of it was shot about the same time it must have been late September or October. I noticed the lack of whitewalls on the Packard too, the only indication in the entire film that there might be such a thing as a war going on.
Some of my first visits to California as a child were in that same time period – that of course added to my enjoyment of the film.
I got to thinking about the Connie at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, NJ which had been shown to me 25 years ago, so I went to see it yesterday. It was great to find that it’s been well cared for in static condition since it landed there in 1976 (though the skin could use a nice polishing). A video of the arrival can be seen here (turn the audio down a bit, the music is way loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RkC-a4jjxU ). There’s a nice little cafe, and the plane can be viewed from inside, though the passenger cabin has been “land-ified” with a vinyl floor, exhibits and an administration desk. The cockpit looks pretty complete though.
It’s a real oldie, as Constellations go. One of 5 remaining of the first gen civil models, it was delivered to Air France in 1946, and went through a number of owners, most notably “Doc” Bayley, a gambling entrepreneur who owned the Hacienda Hotel near the Vegas Airport (See video of the Hacienda’s festive implosion on New Year’s 1996, hosted by the improbably named Rikki Cheese here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97VvYJ7Tbgw ). During the late ’50s, the Connie was part of a fleet of thirty planes he used to bring Californians in on gambling junkets, and “Hacienda Air” had more landings per day in the city than any civil carrier. The latter group forced him out in the early ’60s, but he repurchased this plane amongst a few others while he tried to reestablish the California shuttle (it never happened).
I hope they have something planned for the old girl’s 70th birthday! This photo was taken on Dec. 20, 2014
Nice.
Also, just looking for the whereabouts of that Packard convert. Didn’t find it, but did discover that the young groom was played by Richard Beedle, who turns out to be William Holden’s younger brother.