Lockheed Air Express
The Lockheed Air Express was a parasol-wing mail and passenger monoplane built by the Lockheed Aircraft Company in 1928, adapting the Vega's fuselage to a Western Air Express requirement for work over the Sierra Nevada. Its pilot sat in an open cockpit behind the wing while passengers and mail rode in an enclosed cabin. Production was tiny: Wikipedia counts eight in all, seven standard aircraft plus a one-off special, while Don Berliner's account numbers seven completed aircraft. Record flights by Frank Hawks, Roscoe Turner and Laura Ingalls made the type famous, and none is known to survive.
Why It Mattered
The Air Express was the Lockheed Aircraft Company's second design, first flown in 1928, a year after the company was founded. It adapted the Vega's fuselage to a requirement from Western Air Express, which needed a mailplane able to work over the Sierra Nevada. In service the type carried mail and a handful of passengers, but it was record flying that made it known across the country. Frank Hawks set transcontinental records in one in 1929, and Roscoe Turner's flights in another drew crowds wherever the airplane appeared. Don Berliner, writing in American Aircraft Modeler, noted that though only seven took to the sky, the type became world famous.
Design Notes
Designed by John Northrop, the Air Express kept the Vega's fuselage but raised the wing to a strut-braced parasol position above it. The change was made for Western Air Express, and a more powerful Pratt & Whitney Wasp was fitted to ease operations over the Sierra Nevada. The pilot sat in an open cockpit behind the wing, an arrangement kept because many airmail pilots were convinced they could fly only out in the breeze. Passengers rode in a completely enclosed cabin ahead of the pilot, with seats for four to six and room for up to 1,000 pounds of mail. Most aircraft were Wasp-powered, but one, NR3057, was built with a Pratt & Whitney Hornet instead. With an engine cowling fitted, top speed reached 176 mph.
Operational History
The forerunner was a special built for Western Air Express in June 1928; badly damaged in a landing accident at Las Vegas, it was rebuilt at the factory into the prototype Air Express. As the prototype, it became a record setter: Frank Hawks flew it west to east across the continent in 18 hours, 21 minutes in February 1929. That June he crossed from New York to Los Angeles in 19 hours, 10 minutes and, after a brief rest, returned in 17 hours, 38 minutes. The first production aircraft went to the New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Air Line in March 1929 to carry mail in Argentina, but the airline was soon bought out by Pan Am and the airplane vanished without a trace. The next aircraft, NR3057, named the Black Hornet, won the 1929 Los Angeles-to-Cleveland race under Henry J. Brown in 13 hours, 15 minutes. Gilmore Oil then bought it, and Roscoe Turner renamed it the Gilmore Lion, flying it with a young lion named Gilmore as a publicity companion. In May 1930 Turner set a new record in it, flying from Long Island to Glendale, California, in 18 hours, 43 minutes. Three more Wasp-powered aircraft followed, among them one for Texas Air Transport. The seventh and last, ordered in 1930 but not completed until 1931, was intended for a transatlantic flight that never came off, and it passed to Laura Ingalls. In March and April 1934 Ingalls flew it solo around South America, a 23-country flight of almost 17,000 miles that won her the 1934 Harmon Trophy.
Afterlife
The type's working lives were short, and none of the aircraft is known to survive. NR3057, the record-setting Gilmore Lion, was broken up in 1940. Ingalls's aircraft was sold in 1936 to the Masakatsu brothers, who hoped to fly it nonstop to Japan but never did. After two more owners it was destroyed in a Nevada desert windstorm in 1942, the last of the line. Berliner judged the open-cockpit Lockheed the more glamorous of the company's early monoplanes, though the Vega, not the Air Express, became the commercial success.