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Chasing the WINGED STAR
Air Classics, Jul 2004 by Wainwright, Marshall
WITH ITS SERIES OF WOODEN AIRCRAFT, LOCKHEED BEGAN BLAZING A RECORD-SETTING TRAIL IN THE SKY
Six men stood anxiously in a hayfield near Inglewood, site of today's Los Angeles International Airport, under the hot morning sun. It was the Fourth of July 1927 but they were not shooting firecrackers. Their eyes strained into the blue California sky as they watched a speck on the horizon grow larger.
The speck became an airplane that rocked its wings in salute, dipped into a long, smooth glide, and trailed a cloud of dust as it landed and taxied to a stop. Pilot Eddie Bellande, grinning broadly, jumped from the cabin.
"Boys," he said, "she's a dandy!"
There were answering smiles from the men he greeted. They were Allan H. Lockheed, John K. Northrop, W. Kenneth Jay, Fred S. Keeler, Anthony Stadlman, and Ben Hunter. Only six months earlier, they had formed the Lockheed Aircraft Company with a slim $25,000 in its treasury and an airplane design they felt represented a far-reaching advance.
Painted a glistening orange, with a red star sparkling on its vertical fin, the craft was the first Lockheed Vega - forerunner of an airplane series that flew to fame around the world.
Its fuselage, elliptical in cross-section and torpedo-like in silhouette, refined the molded-plywood technique devised and patented ten years before by Allan Lockheed and his brother Malcolm, Northrop, and Stadlman. Its high wing, spanning 41-ft, employed the cantilever principle that eliminated external, drag-created braces.
Fuselage construction was like that of the S-1 sport biplane built by the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara before that firm folded in 1921. The S-1 had failed to sell in a market glutted with war surplus aircraft (see Air Classics February 2004).
Confronted with this distressing economic reality, Allan - who with his brother had built and flown the first airplanes to carry the Lockheed name - closed the small factory. For the next few years he sold real estate in Los Angeles during its spectacular postwar growth. He was also associated with the regional distributor of the Lockheed four-wheel hydraulic brake for automobiles that his brother had inverted and marketed.
THE VEGA IS BORN
Northop, whom the Lockheeds, had employed as draftsman in 1916, remained in Santa Barbara. But he and Allan kept in touch. In 1923, Allan helped him obtain a job at Douglas Aircraft.
There he did design work on including the famous round-the-world Cruisers that made aviation history in 1924. Of four biplanes that left on a projected global circuit, two completed the 28,000-mile journey in 179 days. One of the pilots was Henry H. Ogden who went on to become vice president of Lockheed Aircraft Service during the 1950s.
In 1926, Lockheed and Northrop roughed out what was to become the celebrated Vega, and Allan began exploring means of financing its construction. The search led him to W. Kenneth Jay, an Iowa-born accountant, Air Service flying instructor during World War One, and long-time aviation enthusiast. Knowing of the previous Lockheed accomplishments, jay scanned the Vega drawings and decided the plane had commercial possibilities.
He, Lockheed, and Northrop prepared a stock prospectus. Jay showed it to his associate, Fred S. Keeler, a brick and tile manufacturer and stockholder in the Empire China Company, whose factory would become the B-1 plant in Burbank.
"Keeler took one look at the prospectus," Jay recalled years later, "and offered to put up the entire $25,000 in return for 51-percent of the common stock and all of the preferred."
LOCKHEED COMPANY FORMED
With Keeler investing all but $2500 - Lockheed himself invested that amount - Lockheed Aircraft Company came into being as a Nevada corporation in December 1926. As president, Keeler gave the company its name. A shrewd businessman, he felt the proposed airplane would be more salable if called a Lockheed because the public would link it with Malcolm Lockheed's hydraulic brakes, in which he had invested and which were widely promoted and advertised.
Other officers included Allan Lockheed, vice president and general manager; Jay, secretary-treasurer; and Ben Hunter, Keeler's attorney, executive vice president. Northrop left Douglas to become chief - and for a time only - engineer. Stadlman was factory superintendent.
Operations began in a small building at Sycamore and Romaine Streets in Hollywood. Northrop suggested Vega as the airplane's name because it was short, easy to pronounce and remember, and connoted astronomical speed and distance.
About $17,500 went into the first Vega, including machine tools and equipment. Probably the biggest expense item was the 220-hp Wright J-5 radial air-cooled engine. During its production Lockheed continued to earn his bread and occasionally some butter - selling real estate. Late every afternoon he went to the Hollywood plant, peeled off coat and tie, and speeded the project along.
HEARST BUYS THE VEGA
Principally because information on monocoque construction was sketchy, production was slow. Day-to-day problems were solved as they arose.
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