American Aviation Historical Society

[Editor’s note: 70 years ago saw both the launch of the American Aviation Historical Society and Convair’s commercial jetliner answer to the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8. The design achieved only a modicum of operational success, while nearly bankrupting the builder. This article originally appeared in the AAHS Journal, Vol 21. No. 3, Fall 1976. The fleet histories have been brought up to date, and many of the photos have been replaced with color representations Though the 880 has gone the way of the Dodo bird, the AAHS continues to soldier on.]

NEWS RELEASE-June 20, 1956

"Hughes Tool Company (of which Trans World Airlines is a subsidiary); Delta Airlines, Inc.; Convair Division of General Dynamics Corporation; and the General Electric Company have combined to bring a new jet transport plane - the world’s fastest and most advanced to the traveling public on the domestic and international routes of TWA and Delta.

"Called the Golden Arrow, the new Convair airplane is a medium-range transport with a top cruising speed of 609 miles an hour. It will be built by Convair at San Diego, Calif., and powered by the new General Electric CJ-805 engine, commercial version of the GE J79 military jet engine, which has already had substantial successful flight experience and is designed to produce more power per pound of engine weight "Thirty of the new transports have been ordered by Hughes Tool Company and will be put in service on TWA, which serves 35,000 miles of routes across the United States, over the Atlantic and in Europe, Africa and Asia. Ten have been ordered by Delta, the nation’s fifth largest domestic airline, which operates 10,765 miles of routes in the United States and six Caribbean countries.

"Deliveries to both TWA and Delta will start in late 1959.

"The total amount of the contracts, including spares, will be well in excess of $200,000,000.

"The new airplane will bring top-speed jet travel luxury to scores of cities where existing airports cannot accommodate any other jet transport which will be available in or near the same period as the Golden Arrow. "The new Convair transport will be able to get in and out of 5,000-foot runways, which are the common maximum in many airports and which are too short for the operation of any other commercial jet airliners announced up to this time.

"A major factor in the Golden Arrow’s performance is its four new General Electric jet engines. Significantly, this marks General Electric Company’s entry into the commercial aircraft engine field. Up to now the company has made more than 31,000 jet engines for the military.

“The name Golden Arrow is derived not only from the airplane’s commercially unmatched speed, but from its planned unique and sensational employment of metal color. The Golden Arrows are planned to be the first airplanes to include exterior metal which is shimmering gold in color rather than the conventional silver color associated with airplanes through the years. This, it is believed, would not only greatly enhance the beauty of the airplane, but would afford it an unmistakable stamp of recognition.

"The Golden Arrow will cruise ‘above the weather’ at 35,000 feet with the cabin pressurized at a comfortable 8,000-feet level.

"It will make possible the following typical schedules:
    Los Angeles-Chicago, 3 hours 24 minutes
    Chicago-Miami, 2 hours 22 minutes
    Chicago-New York, 1 hour 33 minutes;
    Atlanta-New York, 1 hour 36 minutes;
    St. Louis-Pittsburgh, 1 hour 15 minutes;
    Houston-Washington, 2 hours 26 minutes.

"The Golden Arrow will fly at any range from 200 to 3,000 miles with efficiency and economy. Operating costs will successfully compete with any turbine-powered transport available in the same period."

The above-quoted news release, signed by Howard Hughes of Hughes Tool Co., C.E. Woolman of Delta, J.T. McNarney of Convair, and R.J. Cordiner of G.E., signaled the start of a program which ultimately would lead to the largest financial loss on a single project in American history (to that point): the Convair 880. The $425 million loss may be the connotation the financial world attaches to the 880, but ask a pilot who has flown one, and the reply may well be one of high praise for what he considers the finest jet transport ever built. And ignoring the financial aspects and looking into the areas of flying characteristics, speed and safety, the 880 emerges as a significant chapter in the commercial jet transport story.

The 880, built by the Convair division of General Dynamics, was designed for medium-range routes, and was aimed, for the most part, at attracting U.S. domestic operators. It was a smaller aircraft design than that of the initial 707s or DC-8s and not really intended to compete with them. The Boeing and Douglas jets were for transcontinental flights and loads. It was the intermediate and shorter-range markets that GD was after. Development began after that of the 707 and DC-8 also, which put the 880 out of range from a delivery standpoint as . . .

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Few names in the annals of American aviation history are as well-known as that of Gen. James Harold "Jimmy" Doolittle. In the course of his long career, he set records as both a military aviator and a civilian pilot, became the first pilot to make an instruments-only flight without visual references, and famously led the first air raid against Japan during WWII, followed by his command of the Eighth Air Force.

Yet the first of his long list of achievements in the air, in light of his other accomplishments, has often been relegated to a footnote. Doolittle himself would say it was not the most important of his accomplishments. The first time Jimmy Doolittle was nationally celebrated for a feat in aviation was when he became the first pilot to complete a United States transcontinental flight in less than 24 hours.

Having spent his childhood in both California and Alaska, Doolittle left his studies at the University of California Berkeley and joined the U.S. Army in October 1917 to become a military aviator. After completing his ground school training, he was sent to Rockwell Field in San Diego for flight training. During his time as a flying cadet, he married his fiance, Josephine "Joe" Daniels, who would be his constant companion through his career as an Army flier. On March 11, 1918, Doolittle received both his Reserve Military Aviator rating and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Signal Officers Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army. Despite his requests to be transferred to an Aero Squadron fighting the Germans in France, Doolittle was to remain stateside during the First World War as a flight and gunnery instructor.

With the Armistice declared on November 11, 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles signed in the summer of 1919, the entire U.S. military saw its budget shrink, and American military aviation was drastically reduced in the number of personnel and aircraft. It was now up to the airmen who remained in the service to prove the value of airpower to a conservative military and political establishment, and to attract the attention of the American public.

Record Seeking

The end of WWI would see Jimmy Doolittle in Texas as part of the United States Army Border Air Patrol, first as a member of the 104th Aero Squadron, then with the 90th Aero Squadron. While these squadrons were headquartered primarily at Kelly Field in San Antonio and Fort Bliss in El Paso, flight elements of these and other squadrons were often assigned to outposts along the Rio Grande. Doolittle would spend time at the outpost in Eagle Pass. While serving with the 90th, Doolittle would take the squadron’s "Lucky 7" dice emblem and later apply it to other aircraft he would fly later in his career, such as the Granville Brothers Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster.

With little room for career advancement in the peacetime military, Doolittle and many of his fellow military airmen recognized that the Army Air Service had to compete for resources with the ground and naval forces that still saw the new air arm as merely an auxiliary branch. They believed that setting and breaking flight records would help attract the public attention needed to urge Congress to grant the Air Service greater funding. Among the most sought-after records was the coast-to-coast transcontinental record that could demonstrate the airplane’s ability to be the fastest means to cross the country in both peace and war. The ultimate sign of the airplane’s potential was to cross the continental United States in under 24 hours.

The first to contemplate an attempt to span the United States by air in less than 24 hours was Lt. Alexander Pearson, who had gained prior fame for his involvement in the first transcontinenal . . .

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This is the second part of our series on the legendary Beech Bonanza -- the world’s longest continually produced aircraft -- whose eight-decade production came to an end early this year. This issue, we report its military role, as the "Mentor," and its iconic place in the evolution of modern military pilot training.

THE TECHNOLOGY LEADERS

Shortly after the end of World War II, a pair of speedy four-seaters – the V-tailed Beech Model 35 Bonanza, and its rival the North American / Ryan Navion – emerged as the first fully modern civilian light planes in large production in the United States. They were distinguished from other light planes by incorporating the full array of modern innovations that fundamentally set them apart from the prevailing design characteristics of prewar light aircraft:[18]

* Aluminum-shell (semi-monocoque) construction (for weight-reduction, streamlining and durability).
* Cantilever wings (to cut drag)
* Retractable landing gear (to cut drag)
* Flat engine (cylinders placed in horizontally opposing rows, to cut drag & improve visibility, compared to radial engines)
* Variable-pitch propeller (for maximum performance in both cruise and climb) * Tricycle landing gear (safer handling)
* Electric start (for safety and convenience)
* Cowl flaps (for reduced-drag engine-cooling)

Most other aircraft offered in the 1940s offered one or more of these innovations. Notably, most of the innovations did appear in the pre-war, two-seat Globe Swift and Erco Ercoupe. But the former lacked tricycle gear, and the latter lacked retractable gear (and the associated speed), and neither had variable-pitch propellers, let alone four seats. Only the Navion (delivered in 1946) and Bonanza (delivered in 1947) had the full array of modern features, with power and speed to match.[18,19]

The 160-180mph Bonanza, though coming later to the market, promptly eclipsed the 150-160 mph Navion, which it outpaced by 10-30mph. The Bonanza had a wide range of further refinements, including full equipment for day, night, and instrument flight as standard equipment, plus a wide range of superior passenger accommodations. Beech, long experienced in civilian airplane sales, also had a worldwide dealer network that the Navion’s makers could only dream of.[18]

Consequently, the Beech Bonanza essentially conquered the market for fast, single-engine personal and business planes. This enabled Beech to survive the postwar recession (and glut of war-surplus puddle-jumpers) that almost totally wiped out the market for light planes in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[18]

MILITARY MISSIONS:

At about the same time, the pilot training arm of the new United States Air Force (officially formed in 1947 from the U.S. Army Air Forces) was struggling to keep up with the evolving demographics, economics, geopolitics, technologies and challenges of the rapidly changing postwar world. During the war, America’s standard pilot training sequence had looked something like this:[2,21]

CPTP civilian cadet school: Piper Cub or comparable
USAAC/USAAF:
  Primary: Boeing PT-17 Kaydet (Stearman) or Fairchild PT-19/PT-23 Cornell
  Basic: Vultee BT-13 Valiant (aka: "Vibrator")
  Advanced: North American AT-6 Texan
AND/OR
  Twin-engine trainer: Cessna AT-8/AT-17 Bobcat, or Beech AT-10 Wichita, or Curtiss AT-9 Jeep

Each level involved faster, more-powerful, more-complex aircraft than the level before. This sequence allowed a graceful, graduated learning experience, from simple to difficult, and from (relatively) cheap planes to expensive ones (both in the price of the plane, and in their cost of operation and maintenance). This enabled the military to weed out unsuitable trainees, early on, at minimal cost.[21]

But all the planes were tail-draggers, most with radial engines and/or fixed-gear, some with open cockpits. Soon after the war, they were wildly out of sync with a postwar military aviation that was switching to modern combat aircraft, with retractable tricycle gear, even jet engines.[21]

The Air Force had two other problems: Money and Student Attrition.[21]

With the postwar recession, and the nation exhausted with years of military spending, money was tight. The grossly obsolete "Primary" and "Basic" training planes were scrapped from the pilot training curriculum, and a shortened course was handled with "primary" training in the big North American T-6 Texan (with 600-hp radial engine, retractable gear, and . . .

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Some readers, upon seeing the header of this account, will almost certainly be heading for the bookshelves to try to figure out or remember "what the heck is a YA-19?" Well, there were only five YA-19s built and accepted by the Air Corps using Fiscal Year 1938 funding, yet another instance of between the wars thinking and, perhaps, hedging its bets against the similar, but smaller, Northrop A-17 series.

The YA-19s were developments of the basic Vultee V-11 attack series, built with some success for the export market, and these evolved from the elegant V-1 transport, or so it is said, and surely making use of some of the major components of that classic design.

The prototype, NR14980 mounted an 875-hp, SR-1820-F52 engine and featured a truly astonishing canopy for the crew of three that just seemed to go on forever down the upper length of the fuselage, and which became an unmistakable recognition feature of the obscure series.

Assigned U.S. Army Air Corps serials AC 38-549 to 38-554 (five aircraft) another was designated as the XA-19A, (AC 38-555) with a 1,275-hp, O-1230-1 engine (later, rather confusingly, redesignated as the XA-19C) while AC 38-550, one of the YA-19s, was redesignated as the single XA-19B when used as a test bed for the 1,800-hp, R-2800-1, an unsung contribution to the evolution of this historic engine series.

The export sales of the same basic aircraft totaled a respectable 96 aircraft, depending on what count you accept, with Nationalist China acquiring 30 as the V-11G, 26 for Brazil as the V-11GB2 (including eight V-11TS variants configured to mount a pair of huge Edo floats that were, in the event, never used), 40 V-11GBTs for Turkey and a single V-11GB pattern aircraft for Soviet license production of what were reportedly a total of just 31 modified BSh-1s.

But of the USAAC YA-19s, as war approached, they were very capable aircraft in search of a mission but, with only five procured, placing them proved challenging for Wright Field and, of course, with no follow up production contract, spares to support even these were limited to a six-month supply.

Finally, on the last day of August 1939, as Germany swept across poor Poland, one of the aircraft was included in a hastily assembled mix of aircraft dispatched to the Panama Canal Department (PCD), probably AC 38-551, and, following Pearl Harbor, AC 38-549, -552, -553 and -554 were flight delivered to France Field in the Canal Zone – for further assignment to the Military Intelligence Division (MID) as mounts for the far-flung but vital Military and Air Attaché’s assigned to the U.S. . . .

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An aviation enthusiast from an early age, AAHS member, Leonard "Len" Burke had a fascinating aviation career that spanned five continents and five decades. He was a member of AAHS for over 20 years, serving as Membership administrator from 1995 to 2014.

Leonard was born in 1921 in Northampton, Mass., of Irish heritage. Len, as he was known to family and friends, was smitten with airplanes at an early age. At five years of age, he remembered watching the night rotating beacon of a nearby airfield, out his upstairs bedroom window. At eight, he was an original member of the Junior Birdmen of America and started a local chapter in Northampton. In his backyard, he and fellow members built a model airport, complete with hangars, runway and model aircraft. They all lived and breathed aviation, watching the skies and reading the daring exploits of Ted Scott in a popular book series.

Living only a couple of miles from the local airport, Lafleur field, he and his friends would drop whatever they were doing and sprint to the airport when a new airplane type flew overhead. Len’s son Kevin, recalls him talking about the stitch in his side resulting from the breathless flat out run to the field through town, across the railroad tracks and past farms on Old Ferry Road to catch sight of the landing aircraft.

It was there at Lafleur Field that Len met his hero, Charles Lindbergh, who flew into Lafleur often in his Lambert Monocoupe with wife Ann Morrow, a graduate of nearby Smith College. It was the first of several meetups with Lindbergh, all in the 1930s. When in high school, Len saved his money from several odd jobs to pay for a ride with famed aviatrix Ruth Nichols, who came in now and again in a Curtiss Condor offering flight lessons. There was no turning back.

After high school, Len took a job at Pratt & Whitney Engine plant, in Hartford, Conn., for three years. Shortly thereafter, war broke out in Europe, creating his opportunity to fulfill the dream or flying. Being from a depression family, he never could have afforded flight training. But he applied for the Aviation Cadet Program in the Army Air Corps in 1942, qualified, and was off to flight school at Kelly Field, Texas.

World War II

After graduation from flight school, Len’s first assignment was with the Air Transport Command, ATC, ferrying aircraft from west coast factories like Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego, Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, and North American in Los Angeles to east coast transfer points for Europe. He flew several aircraft types, P-38 Lightnings, P-51 Mustangs, P-40 Warhawks, and B-24 Liberators to name a few. He was eventually assigned to a fighter squadron, starting in Casablanca, Morocco, in late 1943.

While in North Africa, he flew missions based in Casablanca, Oran, Algeria, Tunis, Tunisia, and Tripoli, Libya. In early 1944 his squadron moved in its entirety to a unit comprised of C-47s providing medical transport, supplies, and reinforcement services for invasion forces in Sicily and later up the boot of Italy with allied forces, including the invasions at Anzio and Salerno. He noted once that one of the most dangerous parts of his flying time was being fired upon by the U.S. Navy. The fog of war could be confusing for all.

Len spent much of his time flying supplies and replacements to combat units in Italy, and carrying wounded back across the Mediterranean to hospitals at base camps in North . . .

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A formative titan of the modern American aviation industry, Russell W. "Russ" Meyer, Jr,, has died. The three-decade former Chairman & CEO of Cessna Aircraft (world’s largest general aviation manufacturer) – who later ascended to president of Textron Corp.’s Aircraft Sector (Bell Helicopter, Cessna, and Lycoming) – was the hand-picked successor of the man who built Cessna into the world’s General Aviation colossus: Dwane Wallace.

Meyer was born in Davenport, Iowa, on July 19, 1932. He graduated from Yale University with a B.A. degree in 1954, and was awarded a Doctor of Law degree from Harvard Law School in 1961.

Meyer, a former Air Force, Navy & Marine Reserve pilot, was hired in 1966 by American Aviation Corporation to help structure funding for Jim Bede’s American AA-1 Yankee light plane.

Meyer evolved into the company’s CEO, by 1972, overseeing its expansion to a wider range of light aircraft, which became, by 1973, one of the world’s leading lightplane makers in units sold.

In 1973, Meyer led American through a merger, with the civilian aircraft division of Grumman, (which produced Gulfstream business jets and AgCat cropdusting biplanes), to create Grumman American Aviation Corporation, before leaving in 1974.

In early 1975, Meyer was hired as an Executive V.P. of Cessna, and moved to CEO shortly thereafter, upon Wallace’s retirement from the post. Meyer led Cessna Aircraft Co. though the thorny explosion of lightplane crash-lawsuits of the 1970s and 1980s – shifting Cessna’s focus towards more profitable business jets, expanding the line beyond the Citation I to bigger, faster jets, making Cessna the bizjet-industry leader in units sold.

In 1986, with sales of light aircraft suffering from a long recession and high liability costs, Meyer abruptly ended all production of propeller-powered Cessna aircraft (except the turboprop Caravan utility transport), vowing to return them to production only after Congress passed liability limits protecting the industry. (rivals, including Piper/New Piper, Beech/Raytheon and Mooney continued production, minimally, though some with interruptions).

As head of both Cessna and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA), Meyer personally, aggressively pushed hard for that reform. It did not come until 1994, when President Clinton signed the General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA), shaking Meyer’s hand in congratulation. The GARA has been widely (perhaps excessively) credited with reviving a struggling GA industry . . .

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Naval Air Station Wildwood Southern New Jersey, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware River, was always inextricably tied to naval aviation with several air stations during World War II. The largest, and therefore most important, was Naval Air Station Wildwood.

Tracing its origins to President Roosevelt, who used New Deal funds to construct civilian airports under the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) for military conversion in the event of war, Naval Air Station Wildwood was sparked by the emerging need for a pilot training base to protect the Atlantic seaboard from German submarines, which traditionally targeted U.S. supply ships traveling to Britain. Nazi Germany, having already captured France in June 1942, had become an increasing threat.

In Southern New Jersey, the U.S. Coast Guard transferred its station, which was originally built as a World War I naval base in 1917, to the Navy, which then commissioned it “Naval Air Station Cape May” in September 1940 and from which observation and scout squadron training was subsequently conducted.

But the urgency for additional facilities heightened the following year when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, alerting of the need for naval aircraft and proficient dive-bomber pilots. The Cape May base was pitifully inadequate for this purpose, prompting a series of surveys in Lower Township for additional land.

An initial 500 acres, leased for $1.00 from Cape May County for later conversion to civilian use, resulted in March 1942 governmental construction bids, and workmen, under the direction of the Army Corps of Engineers, commenced the arduous deforestation process by clearing trees and filling in swamps to prepare land for a fighting squadron training base in Rio Grande, N.J., a southern New Jersey beach resort. Although the construction effort was successful, its purpose was not: the Army ultimately elected to establish a similar facility some 40 miles north, in Millville, abandoning the project.

Nevertheless, the cleared, 500-acre area, with potential application as an auxiliary field for the inadequately-sized Cape May Naval Air Station, was still 400 acres short of the Navy’s stipulated 900-acre requirement, and this was only remedied by the Cape May County Board of Chosen Freeholders . . .

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The Lockheed Model 10 Electra circled above the vast Pacific, its crew members straining their eyes in search of a small island, just two miles long and rising about 10 feet above the ocean. Rain obscured their vision and played tricks on them. Was that land? No, just raindrops clouding the endless vista. The Pratt & Whitney radials continued their steady drone, but the crew realized they didn’t have much time left before their fuel ran dangerously low.

The Electra’s pilot was a young, vivacious blonde, but her name was not Amelia. Ann Holtgren Pellegreno’s love of flying and yen for adventure had led her to undertake this ambitious journey in July 1967. She and her crew were re-creating the ill-fated around-the-world attempt of Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937, last heard broadcasting to the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, desperately trying to locate tiny Howland Island. Earhart’s plane vanished into the shadows of a mystery that continues to this day.

There were many parallels between the two pilots. Like Earhart, Ann Holtgren grew up in the Midwest, south of Chicago. Ann and her sister Lois enjoyed adventures reserved for young boys, just as Amelia and her younger sister Muriel had. By the time Holtgren reached her teens, she enjoyed watching planes take off and land at Midway Airport. But that’s as close as she got to aviation until the year after she and her husband Don graduated from the University of Michigan, when both were bitten by the flying bug.

"My first lesson was in an Aeronca Champ at Young Field, several miles west of Ann Arbor, Michigan," Ann recalled. Meanwhile she taught English at nearby Saline Junior-High School, just as Amelia had near Boston before starting her aviation career. After achieving her commercial and flight instructor ratings, Pellegreno taught flying at Ann Arbor Airport.

It was the Pellegreno’s aircraft mechanic, Lee Koepke, who suggested Ann participate in a commemorative flight. Koepke owned a restored Lockheed Model 10, a sister ship to the one Earhart flew, and envisioned recreating that 1937 odyssey with the help of a woman pilot. He had taken great pains during the plane’s refurbishment to prepare it for an around-the-world journey. But the true test of his skill would be how the old Electra performed on such a long flight.

Planning the Flight

Planning began in January 1967. They wanted to make the flight at the same time of year as the original attempt, and they hoped to follow Earhart’s route as closely as possible. Additional fuel tanks were needed to raise the capacity to 850 gallons, along with fuel and oil transfer systems, as well as state-of-the-art communication and navigation equipment. For that they would need to find sponsors. Earhart had benefited . . .

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AAHS Journal Vol 71, No 1, "Boys & Their Toys!! Contemporary Die-Cast Aircraft/Banks

The "Toys" article was a fun, if frivolous, read. And yet, as I thought about it, I’ve noticed that those "collectables" generated a remarkable amount of interest in aviation history among people who, otherwise, hitherto, had little or no interest in the topic.

So maybe those are an important contribution to the popularization of American aviation history. My own indulgence in the game was triggered by the discovery of a model that also appears in the author’s closet photo.

The "Embassy Staggerwing": The Beech D17S that was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in London at the start of WWII. It was, in effect, the official transport of the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James: Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., whose son, John F. Kennedy, was living with him in London at the time. JFK is recorded as making an exploratory flight to Berlin, in about 1940, before the U.S. was in the war.

What he discovered, in the Nazi madness there, left an indelible impression, on the young history student, who would become President.

Likely, JFK was sitting the front passenger seat of that Embassy Staggerwing, for the trip. Ron Huckins, the plane’s modern-day restorer, noted that documents with the plane showed JFK rode in it.)

Fast forward to the late-1980s / early 1990s, I met Huckins, through our mutual friend, pilot Dawson Mitts, at Eck Field outside Wichita, where the plane was restored.

Ron was about to fly it to Kansas City for the first leg, of its expected final flight: to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

They arranged that I’d ride along, in that historic passenger seat, to the K.C. stop, then return in Mitts’ Mooney.

As a lifelong admirer of JFK, it was a moving experience, never to be forgotten.

My "toy" replica of the plane, discovered by chance on Craigslist, has become a treasured memento of those historic and personal adventures.

Regards,
Richard Harris

AAHS Vol 70 No 3 (Fall 2025), page 230 "Forum of Flight"

The Lockheed L-749A picture taken in January 1977 is in fact N6021C – the longest surviving 749A (out of the fleet of 40 749/749A Constellations) formerly operated by Trans World Airlines (TWA). The aircraft still wears the remnants of the TWA red cheat-line.

This aircraft, Mfg No 2667 was originally delivered to TWA in April 1951 and served on the airline’s domestic and international networks until withdrawn from use in March 1967, with only 36,491 hours flying time (some high-time airline 749/749A Constellations had over 50,000 hours flying time on the airframe on withdrawal from service).

The Connie was sold, along with many other TWA Connies, in late June 1968 to Aero Tech Inc, which sold it on to one of the many air travel clubs, Discover America Corp., that were formed in that era. The travel club operated it for just under two years before it was repossessed by a bank. The Constellation was then sold on to Travis Leasing Inc in July 1970, who sold it to L.C. McKindree trading as Unlimited Leasing Inc in November 1970. This company operated out of Miami, Fla., flying cargo charters in the Caribbean area and Central America, but the Connie was often standing at Miami for weeks on end, awaiting further work.

In late December 1973 a contract was signed with a U.S. government research agency for 6-8 weeks’ work in January-February 1974 flying out of Sanford, Florida. This was on behalf of an electronics company based in Orlando in connection with the use of laser beams. N6021C flew with the additional under-fuselage Speedpak developed by Lockheed for cargo use, but in this case fitted out with electronics gear. The Connie flew regularly for just under two months on research flights at heights up to 25,000 feet.

After storage at Miami for several months at the end of the government contract, the Connie was sold to an unknown individual who used it for drug smuggling out of Colombia in August 1974 until it was impounded in Winder, Ga., on one of the flights into the United States. The local authorities returned N6021C to Unlimited Leasing several months later and they leased it out to a number of companies for cargo work during 1977 and 1978. Among these were Inair (Panama) and Aeromar (Dominican Republic).

With little revenue coming in, the Constellation was sold to a company named Carib Airways (of Fort Lauderdale) at the end of January 1979, and was again used on drug smuggling flights from Santa Marta in Colombia to the USA until the . . .

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We’ve had the good fortune to have the expertise and support of many aviation enthusiasts in our goal of history preservation. Life priorities change, though, and both Tyson Smith, AAHS President, and Klara Smith (our bookkeeper) have had to step back from AAHS efforts, to support their personal business goals. Tyson and Klara helped greatly in several efforts these last two years, including streamlining our bookkeeping, the design of our future website, and the redesign of the AAHS building. We’re looking forward to days ahead when Tyson and Klara can enjoy the fruits of their labors with the rest of the AAHS membership!

Our search for expertise to better guide us has included a call for additional Board of Director members. We realize that this is a resource we have neglected to fully utilize. Individuals experienced in non-profit management, social media outreach and networking will give us input that we need for effective decision making. Consider submitting your interest in supporting AAHS as a Board of Directors member! I will resume the role of President (this role is required by our By-Laws), as we seek a replacement.

We are very excited about the upcoming opportunity to meet and socialize with our members, in person, at our 70th Anniversary Event, October 2-4, at our new headquarters building, located at historic Flabob Airport, in Riverside, California! What a wonderful opportunity to meet with fellow historians, to learn new perspectives on aviation history, resources available online for research, and visit a great aviation museum. All wrapped up in one package!

An introduction to our 70th Anniversary event was in the Spring AAHS Journal, and an overview of the event is included in this issue. We’ve also been posting to social media (see our Facebook page and Instagram posts, featuring brief profiles of notable AAHS members, and their contribution to aviation history. One member, featured in this issue, is Leonard Burke, longtime member of AAHS and our membership coordinator from 1993-2012.

It is our hope we will be able to meet more of the many AAHS members that have contributed articles, photo collections, stories, or their volunteer hours. When you’ve signed up for the Anniversary event, you will be contacted via email (or by regular mail, if no email provided) to provide feedback on aspects of our weekend event so we can better tailor the event to your expectations. You’ll be asked for food preferences, shirt sizes (we’ll have an Anniversary shirt available), and if you’ve supported AAHS in any capacity. We’ll use this data to make sure your visit is as positive as our staff can make it, and recognize your contributions.

This event not only marks our 70th anniversary, but will give our members a chance to see the tremendous strides AAHS has made in maintaining our mission of aviation preservation. Now is the time to visit AAHS, to see the new professional archiving facilities we’ve developed, the book library we manage on behalf of our members, and experience our new role as "docents" for the historic centers that exist right around us at Flabob Airport. Your Society is growing in new directions, and we want you to see first-hand how that growth will sustain AAHS’ existence for continuing aviation preservation. The cost is very reasonable for a weekend of "live" aviation history. Attendees will leave with special AAHS Anniversary gifts, good memories, and a view into AAHS’ future operations.

Please visit the AAHS website at aahs-online.org to sign up for the AAHS 70th Anniversary Event, or call our office if you have any questions, at 951-777-1332. It will be wonderful to see you.

Jerri Bergen
AAHS President

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