Lockheed Constellation VC-121A

In 1948, with the L-749 line almost at a standstill, the United States Air Force ordered ten L-749As from Lockheed under the designation C-121A. According to Plane & Pilot magazine, they were serial numbers 48-0608 to 48-0617, delivered between December 1948 and the first months of 1949 to Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts. They differed from the civil L-749 in having a reinforced cargo floor and a large aft loading door, although they usually carried 44-seat passenger interiors, and all of them went to the Atlantic division of the Military Air Transport Service (MATS). Eight of the ten took part in the Berlin Airlift, and the same magazine reckons that between them they flew more than 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometres) in almost continuous Atlantic crossings.

Once the airlift was over the aircraft went back to Lockheed to become fast VIP transports. The Wikipedia article on the C-121 states that in 1950 six C-121As were modified as VIP transports, first designated PC-121A and then VC-121A; Plane & Pilot speaks instead of the whole batch. The rework removed the cargo interiors, added windows and fitted weather radar in the nose: according to the magazine, it was the first time an Air Force aircraft carried weather radar. The last C-121A was retired in 1968.

48-0614, named Columbine after the columbine, the state flower of Colorado, carried Dwight D. Eisenhower across the Atlantic when, before his presidency, he was commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). It is now displayed at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona, on loan from the National Museum of the US Air Force.

In the summer of 1950, 48-0613 became the personal transport of General Douglas MacArthur, then supreme commander of the Allied forces in the Korean War. He called it Bataan in memory of the defence of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, which he had left on orders for Australia while his soldiers were forced to surrender; it was one of three aircraft he gave that name. In Bataan he flew 17 missions over the Korean battlefields and, when President Harry S. Truman relieved him of command, he flew home in it one last time to San Francisco. It then served other Army general officers and in 1966 passed to NASA, for which it acted as a communications hub during the Gemini and Apollo programmes under the registration N422NA.

Finally retired in 1970, it was displayed at a museum at Fort Rucker, near Daleville, Alabama. The Planes of Fame Air Museum acquired it in the early nineties (Wikipedia gives 1992, Plane & Pilot 1993), made it airworthy for a flight to Dothan and, after restoring its VIP configuration, displayed it at its Valle, Arizona site. In 2015 it was bought by Lewis Air Legends of Texas, and on 14 January 2016 it arrived at Chino, California, where it was restored by Fighter Rebuilders. Its first post-restoration flight took place on 20 June 2023, and that summer it flew to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh with its cabin still bare. Aerometal International of Aurora, Oregon, then gave it a complete VIP interior, finished in July 2025, days before its second visit to Oshkosh. Seth Hinton, who led the restoration, compared the job to restoring ten or fifteen Mustangs because of the scarcity of parts and specialists, and, having flown as co-pilot on the test flights, said that in the cruise it indicated about 210 knots (about 390 km/h) with hardly any vibration or cabin noise.

48-0610 was built at Burbank, California, as a C-121A and was bailed to Lockheed to support the Lockheed Air Service International maintenance facility at Keflavik, Iceland. In November 1952 President-elect Eisenhower used it to travel to South Korea, and early in 1953 it was converted to VC-121A standard for presidential use. Eisenhower ordered it with more amenities than his earlier Columbine and named it Columbine II. It was operated by the 1254th Air Transport Squadron of the Air Force.

The Wikipedia page devoted to the aircraft states that it was "the first plane to bear the call sign Air Force One". The origin was an incident in 1953: a commercial flight, "Eastern Air Lines 8610", crossed paths with "Air Force 8610", the aircraft carrying the President, and after that confusion it was decided that any Air Force aircraft with the President aboard would use the call sign "Air Force One". The sources disagree on when Columbine III, a VC-121E (53-7885), replaced it: the same page gives 1959 in one paragraph, while its infobox and the general Constellation article place the change in 1954.

After leaving presidential service it stayed with the Air Force until it was stored at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in the late sixties. It was sold as part of a package lot to Mel Christler, a Wyoming businessman who ran a crop-dusting service, who made it airworthy in 1989 to fly it to Abilene, Kansas, for Eisenhower's 100th birthday celebration and to an air show at Andrews Air Force Base. In 2003 it flew to Marana, Arizona, where it sat in storage in the Sonoran Desert. Its owner was considering scrapping it when the Smithsonian Institution, during a research project, told him the aircraft had been a presidential one; he put it up for auction, but it found no buyer. According to Wikipedia, it is the only presidential aircraft ever sold to a private party.

In March 2016 it was bought by Karl D. Stoltzfus Sr., founder of Dynamic Aviation, for less than 1.5 million dollars by his own account, and flown to Bridgewater, Virginia, for restoration. Stoltzfus died in November 2020, but the company kept the First Air Force One project going, with the aim of touring the United States with the aircraft.

The Columbine II page gives its serial number as 48-8610 in the lead and as 48-0610 elsewhere; the Constellation article and the page's infobox give 48-0610, which is the number used here.