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Given the fame and utility of Lockheed aircraft for the
better part of the 20th century, you’d think Allan,
a skilled pilot himself, would have flown one of his beautiful
Golden Age aircraft to Tucson. He didn’t. He
arrived on October 29, 1928 at 4:00PM as a passenger in one
of his airplanes, Lockheed Vega NC7805. Based at Burbank,
CA, Lockheed’s fellow passenger and pilot, Norman Hall
and E.L. Remelin, respectively, arrived from Los Angeles,
remained overnight and departed for El Paso, TX the next
day.
If you follow the link to the airplane’s history,
you’ll find that NC7805 sold two weeks later on November
13, 1928 to Cromwell-Hunt Aero Service, San Angelo, TX. Perhaps
Lockheed’s trip east through Tucson was a demonstrator
trip to show the airplane to Cromwell-Hunt.
Lockheed, among the aircraft manufacturers of the era, is
in good company in the pages of the Davis-Monthan Register.
Among other manufacturers to land at Tucson and sign the
Register are Walter Beech, Clare
Bunch, Clyde Cessna, Reuben
Fleet, William T. Piper,
Jr., Claude Ryan,
Eddie Stinson and Jerry
Vultee. Minor manufacturers also
signed, such as J.B.
Alexander, Vance Breese and Zantford
Granville.
Allan Haines Lockheed was born January 20, 1889 at Niles,
CA. He was one of two sons (brother’s name was
Malcolm) born to John and Flora Loughead. Note the
difference in the spelling of the last name. Allan
legally changed his last name from Loughead to Lockheed in
February 1934. The Lockheed brothers were later intertwined
in business for a good part of their careers.
His mother was a well-known novelist and journalist. She
raised her two boys on a small ranch after separating from
her husband. The boys attended elementary school only,
but were ardently mechanically inclined from an early age. Allan
became an automobile mechanic in San Francisco and by 1909
was driving race cars.
How did Allan get into aviation? He had an older,
half-brother named Victor who was an engineer in Chicago
with an early aviation firm. That firm negotiated rights
to manufacture and distribute the Montgomery Glider (the
parent company was a San Francisco organization). Through
Victor, the Lockheed brothers got involved with installing
a 2-cylinder, 12 HP motor on the glider with Victor acting
as engineer. Allan, without any flying experience,
soloed this airplane on a dare at the Hawthorne Race Track
in Chicago in December, 1910. And so his career in
aviation began.
The first plane to bear the Lockheed name was built by Allan
and Malcolm in San Francisco in 1913. It was a seaplane,
the “Model G”, used by the brothers to take persons
on flights for $10 an hour.
The brothers moved to Santa Barbara in 1915 and formed the
Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company. The firm won
contracts for military seaplanes during WWI –some of
the first awarded – but after the war the company floundered. Malcolm
left in 1919 to pursue hydraulic automobile brakes, but Allan
persevered.
As a post-war effort, and just before Malcolm left, they
linked up with Antony Stadlman (an Early Bird colleague from
Chicago) and John K. Northrop. They designed and built
a novel sport biplane, called the S-1, for the commercial
market. It was tested successfully at Redwood City,
CA in 1919 by Gilbert Budwig and flew well. In competition
with WWI surplus planes, the S-1 did not sell well, however,
and the project was dropped.
Interestingly, Malcolm formed the Lockheed Hydraulic Brake
Company and moved to Detroit. He succeeded in working
with Walter Chrysler to introduce hydraulic brakes on his
1924 automobiles. Malcolm sold his business to Bendix
in 1932.
Meanwhile, in California, the Lockheed aircraft project
went out of business in 1921. Allan went into real
estate and became the west coast representative for Malcolm’s
brakes. With new financial backers Allan reformed
the company in Hollywood during 1926. Stadlman and
Northrop returned to work with him and their first airplane
out the door was the famous, advanced design Lockheed Vega.
The Vega enjoyed stunning success, setting records in speed,
endurance and reliability. It was the chosen mount
for many Golden Age airlines, stars and record setters, including,
among others, Vance Breese, Harold
Bromley, Robert Cantwell,
Amelia Earhart, Hub Fahey, Larry
Fritz, Art Goebel, Wiley
Post (and navigator Harold
Gatty) , Roscoe
Turner and George
Westinghouse.
The following table of Lockheed airplanes landed at Tucson
between 1925 and 1936. “N” prefixes have
been omitted. Follow the links to learn the histories of
the individual aircraft.
In 1928 the company sales exceeded one million dollars. In
1929 Detroit financial interests formed the Detroit Aircraft
Corporation and bought Lockheed and several other firms. Allan
was not in accord and sold his stock and left the company. See
the following for more details.
Allan Lockheed, ca. 1960s
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This PDF download (671KB)
is a seven-page autobiography of Lockheed that was written
by him at the request of the publication “Who’s
Who in America”. It
covers the years 1910-1942. Besides the biographical
information, it is useful, too, because it includes images
of some to the Lockheed airplane types (at right, he holds
a model of NR-105W, the Lockheed Vega named "Winnie Mae"
flown by Wiley Post). This
PDF document is an example of the original material available
in Lockheed’s
NASM dossier (cited in left sidebar), and is fairly typical
of the kind of artifacts I use to build the Web pages for
people, airplanes and events on this site.
Lockheed died May 26, 1969 at age 70 in a Tucson hospital. Brother
Malcolm preceded him in death on August 13, 1958. Allan
is interred not far from where 147 landings were made by
his aircraft between 1925 and 1936.
He probably rests
easy to know now that of 198 Lockheed Vega, Sirius, Orion
and Altairs ever made, fully 91 of them (46%) landed at the
old Davis-Monthan Airfield. Explore the links above to see
how the pilots and aircraft of the Golden Age were touched
by his hand.
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Dossier 2.1.115
UPLOADED: 06/16/07 REVISED: 03/11/10
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