- This video was brought to you
together with Squarespace. I bet that you've never
seen anything like this and I doubt that you ever will again. Why did this aircraft
have three tail fins and such a sculpt
intricately-curved fuselage instead of just a simple tube like all other modern airliners have? Well, that's what you
will find out in today's video, where I will tell you the story
of the Lockheed Constellation, one of the most graceful
airliners ever made and its crazy origin story. Stay tuned. (playful chime) The story of the Lockheed Constellation or Connie as it maybe is more known started in the second half of the 1930s with a design study called
the Model 44 Excalibur. At that time, airliners
were still relatively small and tended to have only two engines like the Douglas DC-2
and the DC-3 which I've already covered in a different video
here in this Classics Series. But as the 1930s moved on,
aircraft manufacturers wanted to start taking advantage
of available newer, better engines and all-metal aircraft constructions in order to create larger aircraft
who could use four engines and therefore would be able
to carry more passengers and have better range. To do this, manufacturers initially looked at developing
four-engine versions of their existing twin-engine aircraft. For example, Douglas worked on an early DC-4
concept to follow its DC-3 and Lockheed wanted to make a four-engine version
of its Model 10 Electra. That's the same aircraft
that Amelia Earhart attempted to fly around the world with
when she famously disappeared. Now Boeing were,
of course, also in the game and were designing the 307 Stratoliner which was basically
a pressurized airliner version of its B-17 bomber. Competition was fierce,
both for the airlines who wanted to use this new aircraft and for the aircraft makers
who wanted to sell them. Some airlines were looking
for exclusivity from the manufacturers in order to get access
to their newest models before anyone else and some
of the manufacturers also wanted the airlines to buy only
their planes and in that way, assure their production lines. Douglas was a great example
of this and they were working hard on cashing in on the good will capital that they had gained with
their popular DC-2 and their DC-3s so this was the environment
that Lockheed found themselves in as they started looking for
buyers for their Model 44 Excalibur. Initially, Lockheed wanted
to make this plane in a different size than the models Boeing
and Douglas were making in order to avoid competing
directly with them and possibly running into any of
those exclusivity clauses. They initially pitched the Excalibur
to Pan Am but negotiations didn't look very promising
with Pan Am being more keen to get the Boeing 307. So Lockheed instead
turned their attention to Transcontinental & Western Airlines or TWA since they had a history
of taking bets on new designs. - Well, it so happens that we-- - Well, we've already
reserved seats on TWA. If you remember,
it had actually been TWA who had triggered Douglas
to make the DC-2 which had then led to the awesome DC-3. But before we look at what happened
with the TWA negotiations, in order to fully understand
how the Lockheed Excalibur became the Constellation,
we first need to look at a very special
Lockheed aircraft designer, Clarence Leonard Johnson, more commonly known
as Kelly Johnson. Now if you count
yourself as an aviation fan but you haven't heard of this guy, well then you have some reading to do. But in any case, you will have
definitely heard of many of his designs. Among many others, Kelly Johnson
designed the P-38 Lightning, the P-80 Shooting Star which, by the way, was the
first American-made jet, the F-104 Starfighter,
the U-2 Spy Plane and the SR-71 Blackbird. He even had a hand in some
of Lockheed's later projects like the F-117 Nighthawk. Kelly had early on made a name
for himself within Lockheed thanks to his work
on the Model 10 Electra. He had noticed and fixed
an early stability issue in the Electra design
which had basically saved the whole aircraft project
and with that, all of the investments that had gone into it and he did that when
he was only 23 years old. Kelly Johnson was born in Michigan but his parents were both
from Malmö in Sweden. After this first design correction,
he continued evolving the design of the Model 10, making
different passenger-carrying versions and even a bomber after that. His fantastic understanding
of aerodynamics and how to incorporate them
into aircraft designs, made him a true legend
in the aviation world. Hall Hibbard, Johnson's
boss at Lockheed once said about him, "That damn
Swede can actually see air!" When he later heard of this,
Kelly Johnson would say that this was the greatest compliment that he'd ever gotten. Despite getting his start
with the Model 10 Electra, most of the work that Johnson
would later become famous for involved military planes
and there is a good reason for that. During World War II,
when the U.S military discovered that the Germans
were developing jet fighters, they quickly asked Lockheed,
among other companies, to design something that could
be able to beat the German designs and to do that fast. In response to this, Kelly Johnson
did something, well, a little bit strange. He rented a circus tent
and pitched it up in an empty part of Lockheed's aircraft complex in Burbank, California. His team of engineers and mechanics then proceeded to work non-stop
in that tent for 143 days designing and building the prototype
of the P-80 Shooting Star. Now, either the fabric of this tent or possibly a plastic factory next to it, emitted a really strong stench which the whole place
became notorious for. And that's why some
of Johnson's people mockingly started calling it Skonk Works, which was the name
of a rundown Factory in Li'l Abner's comic strip. And if that brings a bell for you,
it's probably because it would later be renamed Lockheed Skunk Works and that part of Lockheed
would continue to grow and take charge of all of their later, most sensitive design projects, getting famous for models
capable of extreme speed and, equally, extreme secrecy. Interestingly though,
this secrecy was something that Lockheed and Kelly Johnson had already practiced already
as early as in 1939 when they started their talks with TWA. That had started in a meeting
which would turn the somewhat unambitious Model 44 Excalibur
into the revolutionary and stunning-looking Constellation. So what had happened? Well, back in 1939,
TWA wasn't the same company as the one that had convinced
Douglas to make the DC-1 and DC-2. And that's because in 1937,
the company had gotten a new major stockholder
in Howard Hughes, the now famous industrialist,
millionaire, Hollywood personality, pilot and overall huge aviation fan who had taken the reins of the company. Hughes was very keen
on leaving his mark on the airline industry as he had done with basically everything else
that he had touched so back in 1939, he held a private meeting
at his home with several TWA and Lockheed staff
including Kelly Johnson. Hughes wanted Lockheed
to develop what he called The Airliner of the Future and his ideal plane
would have enough range to travel non-stop from the east to the west coast of the United States, carrying, at least, 36 passengers. And he wanted it to be faster
than anything else that was flying at the time, much faster. It quickly became obvious
that Lockheed and Kelly Johnson would need to completely revamp
the Excalibur in order to meet Howard's expectations. The aircraft needed to get
both longer and equipped with newer, bigger engines than before and the wings fitted
to the redesigned aircraft would become similar in profile
to that of the P-38 Lightning which was the fastest fighter
in existence at the time. All of these changes
would lead Lockheed to give the plane a completely new name. It would become the Model 49
or the L-049 Constellation. The end result of this revamp
was an aircraft with a cruise speed of over 270 knots. And to put Kelly Johnson's
design feat into perspective here, the Connie's rival,
Boeing's 307 Stratoliner, cruised at less than 200 knots
and also at lower altitude. The early Douglas DC-4 would
be a bit faster than the Boeing but still considerably slower
than the Constellation was. Lockheed and Kelly Johnson's marvel completely outclassed all of its rivals but there were no big
headlines showing off their feat and that was because
outside of Lockheed and TWA, nobody actually knew
about this fantastic aircraft. For all intents and purposes,
the Lockheed Constellation was a secret project
and this was at the insistence of the eccentric and
wealthy Howard Hughes. He wanted his airline, TWA,
to get 40 of these beauties and, crucially, Hughes wanted
to get delivery of the 35th plane before anyone else had learned
that the aircraft even existed. This was a bit crazy
for a couple of reasons. Firstly, even military projects
didn't really have this level of secrecy back at the time. People didn't really think
that it was humanly possible to keep such a huge
project secret for very long. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly in this case, the secrecy meant
that Lockheed obviously couldn't get any deposits from other
potential customers to fund the development
of the Constellation. This meant, in reality,
that Howard Hughes would effectively have to fund
the design and introduction of this aircraft to service all by himself. Back in 1940, before
the first prototype even flew, the L-049 was priced at $450,000 which is nearly $10 million
in today's currency. Now that might not sound
like much for an aircraft but remember that Howard Hughes had bought 40 of them. Incredibly, it seemed like
this secrecy actually worked at least, initially. By 1940, it seemed like no other airline knew about the project. Pan American, TWA's main rival did know of the earlier
Lockheed 44 Excalibur Model since Lockheed had tried
to sell it to them first but as far as they knew,
that project had simply been abandoned by Lockheed. Even as the Prototype of the L-049 started to take shape in Burbank, the world remained
completely oblivious of it. But that couldn't continue for long because obviously, World War II
was already raging by then. The United States wouldn't join the war until December of 1941
but even before that happened, with U.S involvement in the war
looking more and more likely, the country's military
planners ordered to inspect all of the key industrial facilities all around the country and that
obviously included Lockheed's facilities at Burbank as well. With its secret looking certain to leak, Lockheed decided to let
the cat out of the bag and announced the existence
of the Constellation to a stunned aviation industry. Pan Am immediately ordered 40 of them, matching TWA's order
and several other airlines also placed smaller orders for it. Besides its incredible speed
and impressive range, the Lockheed Constellation's features also included modern touches like de-icing, hydraulically-boosted controls, propellers with reversible pitch
and of course, cabin pressurization. It also used a tricycle
landing gear configuration with a nose gear assembly
instead of a tail wheel which was still a relatively
new idea at that time. And that brings us to one
of the signature design features of this aircraft, it's three-tailed fin. Have you guessed why
it was designed that way yet? Well, to start with, Lockheed
had a history of designing planes with more than one tail fin,
including the Model 10 and some of its subvariants. But what one reason
why the Constellation and the Excalibur designs
had three tail fins actually involved their
new tricycle landing gear. With the tail dragger designs,
the tail of the plane would obviously sit a bit
lower, closer to the ground when the aircraft was parked. So even if an aircraft had
a fairly tall vertical fin, it wouldn't protrude very high up. This meant that even
relatively big aircraft didn't need service hangars
with specially high doors or ceilings. But, of course, this changed
when the aircraft suddenly would start to stand on a tricycle gear with the tail fin now
reaching much bigger heights. This meant that the airlines
would now need to build expensive, new, much bigger and higher hangars or get seriously creative
in order to be able to service their new aircraft. So the aircraft manufacturers,
including Lockheed, saw this issue and tried to help their customers to avoid this additional expense. Having three vertical stabilizers
and rudders meant that each one could be made smaller so the
Constellation's maximum height remained relatively low
at around 24 feet or 7.3 meters although
some later versions would get a little bit taller than that. Now Lockheed actually wasn't
alone in thinking this way. The first Douglas DC-4 prototype,
later renamed the DC-4E also had three vertical tail fins for the very same reason
but hangar size didn't explain the other unique design feature
of the Constellations, it's beautiful curved fuselage making it look almost like a dolphin. Why didn't it use a tubular fuselage like pretty much all of the other aircraft out there at the time and even today? After all, a fuselage with
a constant diameter is both simpler to make
and it enables a manufacturer to both shorten or extend it
easily in order to produce different aircraft versions. By contrast, the design
of the Lockheed Constellation meant that no two bulkheads
in the structure would be the same and no two skins or longerons, which are the beams
connecting these bulkheads, would be the same either. Not only was this a nightmare
for manufacturing and repairs, it also made pressurization
loads on the structure more difficult to study
and keep under control. So why did Lockheed
and Kelly Johnson build the aircraft this way? Well, the answer is a bit unclear but in essence it seems
like they believed that they had to build it that way. Howard Hughes wanted the
ultimate airliner in terms of speed. And theoretically, at least, a constantly varying
cross-section design could be a bit more efficient. Now if that is actually the case,
is a bit debatable but to be fair, the early Douglas DC-4E prototype also featured a teardrop-like fuselage so it was likely the thought of the time. And in practice, Lockheed really had no reason not to build
the Constellation this way. Remember Howard Hughes
was paying for its development and even Pan Am were happy
to match TWA's order when they found out about it. So with the customers happy,
Lockheed was also happy. And I think really that we should
be happy as well for this beauty to have been built that way. In any case, all of this
looked great for Lockheed but when the first Constellation
finally took to the skies in 1943, the world had, unfortunately, changed. The entry of the United States
in the war meant that the production of those first 80 Connies
for TWA and Pan Am was immediately switched over
to the US Army Air Force instead. The plane's military designation
would be the C-69 and, officially, its role would be to
carry troops, cargo and VIPs. At one point, there were
orders for over 200 C-69s of different versions because
of a perceived need to carry troops and cargo over vast distances,
especially over the Pacific Ocean. But as it turned out, Lockheed ended up only Building
22 Constellations during the war and they only delivered 15
of those to the Army Air Force. In reality, the C-69 Constellation
had very low priority for the military since the simpler
Douglas C-54 Skymaster which was basically a military DC-4 could generally do the
same job just fine despite being slower
and having less range. In other words, the Constellation was too much airplane for the military despite Lockheed's very catchy boast that it was faster than the Japanese Mitsubishi
A6M Zero Fighters. The Connie also had one more rather serious wartime disadvantage. One reason for the plane's
great speed was its four powerful Wright R-3350 Duplex
Cyclone Radial Engines. Early in their development,
these engines were quite troublesome, mostly due to overheating
issues but more importantly, the same engines were used
for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress which had a much higher
priority for the military. With that in mind,
it's hardly surprising that the Army Air Force
preferred the C-54 Skymaster which was not competing
with the B-29 for the engines. In the end, Douglas ended up
building thousands of these, far outstripping Lockheed's production. But despite this
and the eventual cancellations of hundreds of military aircraft orders, Lockheed wasn't in such a terrible shape when the war finally ended because it turns out that after the war, the Connie was still the
fastest airliner on the market. Boeing and Douglas were
both developing aircraft that would eventually beat it but they were still some years
into the future at that point. Lockheed bought back
nearly all of the Constellations from the military and
set about converting them to commercial airline standard. The Constellations weren't yet certified as an airliner when the war ended but Lockheed had done much
of that certification work already during the war, as it progressed. Plus Lockheed had, with the Connie, a proven design with
those early engine problems now understood and sorted out and a production line ready to go. This meant that the
orders started rolling in. TWA still got priority
as a launch customer but Lockheed's Constellations eventually flew in many
other airlines' colors. And if you have flown in the Connie, I would love to read
about it in the comments. I have been so touched
by some of your stories in earlier episodes. Now later versions of the Connie would be even faster than the original and carry more fuel,
providing even greater range. From 1951, Lockheed
started producing a total of 600 of the larger
Super Constellations and Starliners. The last version of the Constellation left the production line in 1958 which was the same year
as Boeing's 707 entered service. For most of its existence,
Connie's selling point was its speed so the arrival of the jet age meant that it simply
couldn't stay competitive even though its last versions
actually had a longer range than the Boeing 707 did. Lockheed tried fitting turboprop engines to the Super Constellation
which made it seriously fast in testing but, unfortunately, reliability issues with those early turboprops
meant that this project didn't go very far. Lockheed would eventually move on
to develop the turboprop L-188 Electra in the late 1950s. Predictably, the Electra
had a tubular fuselage with a constant cross-section
just like everyone else and a single vertical tail fin. The Electra was far from as graceful
as the Connie was and it turned out to not be particularly successful
as an airliner either. But Lockheed eventually
turned it into the military P-3 Orion which ended up selling quite well anyway. Lockheed didn't make another airliner after the Connie and the Electra until they tried their luck
with the awesome L-1011 TriStar which, unfortunately,
also turned into an economic fiasco. They haven't made another airliner since but they have been much more successful as a military aircraft maker and today, they are the world's
largest military contractor with the legacy of Kelly Johnson
and his Swedish heritage still shining true. And talking about Swedish,
did you know that a TRE friend of mine and me are running
a virtual Boeing 737 course for anyone interested
in flying home flight simulators? Well, we are and the last one
we did was so much fun. Actually it was so much fun
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if you're interested. Using Squarespace to create this site turned out to be super easy, even for Ben. Squarespace have hundreds
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10% off your first purchase. Now check out these videos next
which I think that you'll really like and consider supporting the channel by buying a t-shirt
or becoming a member of my awesome Patreon crew. Have an absolutely fantastic day
and I'll see you next time, bye-bye.
