Aerospace: No End in Sight

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But past exploits were hardly enough to save the company. What did save it was a new plane, whose basic design Bob Gross conceived while lingering over coffee one morning in the lobby of Burbank's Union Air Terminal. The plane was Lockheed's Electra 10, a twin-engine, all-metal, ten-passenger ship with the highest load/gross-weight ratio and the lowest price ($36,000) of any comparable aircraft of its time. The Electra 10 sold solidly to U.S. airlines as well as to carriers in Latin America and eight European countries (Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in an Electra 10).

The Fork-Tailed Devil. The Electra 10 turned Lockheed into a better-thangoing concern, and World War II converted it into a giant. Its P-38 Lightning, the only U.S. fighter in continuous service throughout World War II, was dubbed by Luftwaffe pilots "der gabel-schwanz Teufel"—"the fork-tailed devil." Making Hudsons for the British before the U.S. entered World War II, Lockheed ran into the U.S. Neutrality Act, which forbade either U.S. or British citizens to ship or fly the planes from the U.S. to Britain. Court Gross helped devise a stratagem. Lockheed bought a wheat farm on the North Dakota-Canada border, flew its bombers there from the Burbank assembly line, hitched them to teams of horses. The horses, supposedly not subject to the laws of man, drew the planes across the boundary. Canadians unhitched the animals, let British pilots ferry the aircraft on to England.

During the war, Court Gross went to Burbank as Lockheed's general manager, showed his executive ability by unscrambling the production tangles sometimes left by his brother's impulsive decisions. At war's end, Lockheed stayed aloft because it was ready not only with the four-engine Constellation, which ran away with the first round of airline orders, but with the U.S.'s first jet fighter, the F80 Shooting Star, which provided the basic design for so many later models that Lockheed engineers nicknamed it "Old Hodgepodge."

For Lockheed, it all looked too good to be true—and it was. Saturn, a 16-passenger feeder transport, and the Constitution, a 168-passenger behemoth, proved to be expensive flops. After a disastrous crash, Washington grounded all Constellations, and order cancellations piled on top of rewiring costs. Though Lockheed eventually lost $35 million on commercial sales of the Connie, the plane returned to the air, set speed records for four-engine piston craft that may never be broken, and airlines still fly 455 Constellations in a day when anything that isn't a jet is considered a creep. Again, in 1959, when Lockheed's Electra turboprops began coming apart in midair, the company's sales of passenger planes crashed with them. Burdened with a $25 million bill for modifying Electras, which have since performed splendidly, and a $31 million loss on its ten-passenger executive JetStar, the company sank $42.9 million into the red in 1960. The next year, Bob Gross died of cancer and his brother moved up from president to chairman.