He treated the project with all the subterfuge that secret weapons require. Hughes went about publicizing the Constellation the best way he knew how: by breaking a transcontinental speed record on a Burbank to Washington, D.C., flight in April 1944. Le Lockheed Super Constellation F-BRAD 1049-G se pose définitivement à Nantes, pour son dernier vol en 1974. Il est issu du projet Excalibur de la fin des années 30, conception d’Howard Hughes d’un avion de ligne pressurisé. Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation.

Les maquettes de Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation sont disponibles aux échelles suivantes : 1/144, et chez les marques suivantes : Extra Tech, Le Lockheed Constellation est un avion ligne américain. By 1948, the Navy was calling in orders for Connies to act as long-range patrol aircraft , nicknamed Po-Boys from the PO-1 designation then in use.

It was a plane ahead of its time, at least twice as fuel efficient as the industry’s first jets and as efficient as many of today’s modern aircraft.In the years to come, the plane would be named the Constellation—Connie for short—and be flown by airlines around the world, as well as the U.S. military over the ensuing three decades.

Suite aux demandes de la TWA, l’entreprise Lockheed de Hugues, installée à Burbank (Californie) transforma le projet initial pour répondre à la demande de TWA. They wanted to build the company’s first large transport, one that “would carry more people farther and faster than ever before, and economically enough to broaden the acceptance of flying as an alternative to train, ship and automobile,” said Johnson.

It would be faster than most World War II fighters at 350 mph. Un total de 856 appareils sont produits dans plusieurs versions, toutes reconnaissables à la triple dérive et au fuselage en forme de dauphin. It was a plane equally beautiful in form as well as function. Not only did he demand total secrecy, but also specified that Lockheed could not sell the aircraft to any other transcontinental airline until TWA had received 35 of them.Hughes outlined the initial performance specifications, but it was Lockheed that would design the sleek, distinctive, now-iconic aircraft. In 1939, the top brass of the Lockheed Corporation - president Robert Gross, chief engineer Hall Hibbard, and chief research engineer Kelly Johnson - scheduled a key meeting with a VIP, a man with deep pockets who had recently shown an interest in buying not just one or a handful of new planes but a fleet of them. En outre, ils sont restés inchangés empennage avec la caractéristique triple dérive ovale. It was a critical turning point for Lockheed. He hoped to hire Lockheed to design a revolutionary aircraft capable of comfortably shuttling 20 passengers and 6,000 pounds of cargo across the United States, offering commercial aviation’s first coast-to-coast, non-stop service.Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company, is engineering the future of vertical lift.Having purchased a majority stake in TWA airlines earlier that year, Hughes saw the Constellation as his secret weapon in stealing market share from his competitors. It was the first military version of the Lockheed Constellation aircraft line. Le Lockheed Constellation (Connie) est un avion de ligne à hélices avec 4 moteurs en étoile Wright R-3350 de 18 cylindres. As Hibbard said, “Up to that time we were sort of ‘small-time guys,’ but when we got to the Constellation we had to be ‘big time guys’ … We had to be right and we had to be good.”But the Lockheed team had come to express even grander ambitions.

Being good meant introducing new features previously unseen on passenger planes. Avion de transport américain.