Lockheed Vega Vega 1

The Vega was designed by John Knudsen Northrop and Gerald Vultee, both of whom would later found their own companies, originally to serve Lockheed's own airline routes. The aim was a four-passenger-plus-pilot aircraft that was rugged and at the same time one of the fastest of its era. The recipe was a wooden monocoque fuselage, plywood-covered cantilever wings and the best engine available.

The construction method was striking. Using a large concrete mould, half a fuselage shell was laminated in sections with glue between each layer; a rubber bladder was then lowered into the mould and inflated with air to compress the lamination against the inside. The two halves were nailed and glued over a separately built rib framework. Since a fuselage built that way could not be cut through by the spar, the single-spar cantilever wing was mounted on top of the aircraft. Only the engine and landing gear were left unstreamlined, and on production versions the wheels carried teardrop-shaped fairings; only the earliest examples lacked NACA cowlings and left the cylinders exposed to the airstream.

The first Vega 1, named Golden Eagle, flew from Lockheed's Los Angeles plant on 4 July 1927. It cruised at 190 km/h — fast for the time — and topped out at 217 km/h. Orders from private owners followed quickly: by the end of 1928, 68 had been produced, and at the 1929 National Air Races in Cleveland the Vegas won every speed award.

In 1928 the Vega Yankee Doodle (NX4769) was used to break transcontinental speed records. On 19-20 August, Hollywood stunt flier Arthur C. Goebel broke Russell Maughan's coast-to-coast record by flying from Los Angeles to Garden City, New York, in eighteen hours and fifty-eight minutes, in what was also the first non-stop west-to-east flight. On 25 October, barnstormer and former mail pilot Charles B.D. Collyer broke the non-stop east-to-west record set in 1923 by the US Army Air Service, in twenty-four hours and fifty-one minutes. Attempting the reverse record on 3 November, Collyer crashed near Prescott, Arizona, killing himself and the aircraft's owner, Harry J. Tucker.

The Vega was not easy to land. Elinor Smith wrote in her memoir that it had «all the glide potential of a boulder falling off a mountain». Forward and side visibility from the cockpit was extremely limited: Flying columnist Lane Wallace noted that even in level flight the windscreen offered a better view of the sky than of anything else, and that on take-off or landing there was almost no forward visibility at all.