Convair

The older branch of the house was the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, formed in 1923 by Major Reuben H. Fleet. Consolidated reached the Second World War with two decisive products: the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, of which roughly 18,500 were built by the company and a network of major contractors — enough to make it the most-produced bomber in history — and the PBY Catalina patrol flying boat, which stayed in production until May 1945 and passed 4,000 examples. In 1943, by then under AVCO control, Consolidated merged with Vultee Aircraft and the combination came to be called Convair, first informally and then officially. The new manufacturer ranked fourth among United States corporations by the value of wartime production contracts, ahead of giants such as Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed.

In March 1953 General Dynamics bought the whole company and turned it into its Convair Division. These were the years of the firm's greatest technical influence: together with Dassault it explored the delta wing systematically and applied it to the F-102 and F-106 interceptors and to the supersonic intercontinental nuclear bomber B-58 Hustler. It also kept the B-36 in service, the largest land-based piston-engined bomber in the world, with a mixed ten-engine arrangement of four turbojets and six Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major radials driving pusher propellers. The civil jet venture went far worse: the Convair 880 flew on 27 January 1959 and the 990 Coronado on 24 January 1961, but only 65 and 37 were built respectively and the company left airliner design behind. The industrial capacity built up for them did pay off as subcontract work, and Convair went on to make fuselages and large airframe sections for McDonnell Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed.

From the 1950s onwards the company shifted money and engineers towards missiles and rockets. It produced the Terrier shipborne surface-to-air system and, above all, revived the Atlas, a 1945 proposal built around a thin-walled pressurised airframe that in the following decade became an intercontinental ballistic missile for the Air Force. It first launched in 1957 and its military career was short — the Titan II displaced it in 1962 and the solid-fuelled Minuteman followed — but as a civil launcher it lasted for decades: it carried the crewed orbital flights of Project Mercury in 1962 and 1963 and, paired with the Centaur upper stage, became the workhorse for geosynchronous satellites and planetary probes. Centaur itself, also a Convair design, was the first widely used stage to burn the cryogenic combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, a direct precursor of the Saturn V S-II and S-IVB stages; it began flying with the Surveyor lunar landers from 1966. More than a hundred Atlas-Centaur vehicles launched over a hundred satellites and science missions, among them Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, the first probes sent on trajectories out of the Solar System.

The end came piecemeal. General Dynamics announced the sale of the Missile Systems Division to Hughes Aircraft in May 1992; in 1993 it handed the Fort Worth plant, and the intellectual property of everything designed there, to Lockheed; and in 1994 it sold the Space Systems Division to Martin Marietta and the aircraft structures unit to McDonnell Douglas. In July 1994 General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas agreed to terminate the contract under which Convair supplied MD-11 fuselages, and that termination sealed the end of the division and of the company's presence in San Diego, where it had once employed 18,000 people. The Kearny Mesa complex was demolished between 1994 and 1996, and in 1996 General Dynamics deactivated the last legal entities of the Convair Division, closing an aircraft-building tradition the city had sustained for seven decades.