Lockheed Vega

The Vega began as an in-house requirement: Lockheed wanted an aircraft for its own routes and asked John Knudsen Northrop and Gerald Vultee, both of whom would later start companies of their own, for a rugged machine carrying a pilot and four passengers that would also be among the fastest of its day. The answer was a plywood monocoque fuselage laminated in a concrete mould and closed over a separate framework of wooden ribs, plus a single-spar cantilever wing which, unable to pass through that shell, was mounted on top of it. Only the engine and the landing gear escaped the aerodynamic clean-up, and even there production aircraft wrapped the wheels in teardrop fairings. The first Vega 1, named Golden Eagle and powered by a 225 hp Wright J-5 Whirlwind radial, flew from the Los Angeles plant on 4 July 1927, cruising at 120 mph with a top speed of 135 mph.

Demand came from private owners before it came from airlines. By the end of 1928, 68 had been delivered, and at the 1929 National Air Races in Cleveland the Vegas took every speed award. That same year Lockheed introduced the Vega 5, whose 450 hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp and NACA cowling improved performance enough to add two more seats and raise cruising speed to 155 mph and top speed to 165 mph; 64 of that variant were built, many for executive transport but also for carriers such as Pan American and Transcontinental and Western Air. In 1931 the United States Army Air Corps bought two metal-fuselaged Vegas built by the Detroit Aircraft Corporation. Total production is counted as between 128 and 132 aircraft depending on the source, a spread that reflects how the work was split between Lockheed, Detroit and other shops.

The record flights explain the Vega's standing better than its sales figures do. In 1928 the Yankee Doodle was used to attack the transcontinental records: on 19 and 20 August, Arthur C. Goebel flew Los Angeles to Garden City in 18 hours and 58 minutes, also the first non-stop west-to-east flight, and on 25 October Charles B. D. Collyer covered the opposite direction in 24 hours and 51 minutes, only to die on 3 November attempting to better the mark. In a Vega 5B registered NC7952, Amelia Earhart made the first solo transatlantic crossing by a woman, from Newfoundland to Ireland; in the Winnie Mae, Wiley Post went around the world twice and proved the existence of the jet stream; and Hubert Wilkins used a float-equipped Vega on pioneering flights over the Arctic and Antarctica. It was not a forgiving machine: forward and side visibility from the cockpit was severely limited, and Elinor Smith wrote that it glided like a boulder falling off a mountain. Earhart's aircraft and the Winnie Mae are both preserved today at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.