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Aviation History
1964
1964 - 1764.PDF
979 low VISIT TO GEORGIA In and Around "The World's Largest Single Aircraft Plant' BY MARK LAMBERT LAST month Mark Lambert, of "Flight International" visited the Lockheed-Georgia Co at Marietta. The main building of this company is believed to be the largest aircraft-production facility under one roof in the world; it covers 48 acres and contains several miles of motorable roadways, offices, laboratories and machine shops, besides the five production lines, but there are no external windows. Three programmes are recorded here, beginning with the most important, that for the C-141 StarLifter. 1: STARLIFTER THE C-141A StarLifter programme is one of America's mostimpressive aircraft-production operations. Approximatelythree-and-a-half years after the US Air Force order was placed, seven aircraft have been rolled out and some 150hr of test %ing completed on six of them. The sixth aircraft just failed to make the 2nd International Forum for Air Cargo in Montreal on May 26, but both military and FAA certification are expected to be completed by the end of this year—a month early, because 1964 sounds better than 1965. The USAF order at present stands at five pre-production and 127 production aircraft, with follow-on orders to an expected total of about 300. By next year production should reach seven of these 318,0001b, 550 m.p.h. strategic freighters Per month, from a factory which in the same period also builds 12 or !3 C-130s and one JetStar. While the military C-141 is a most significant aircraft from the engineering point of view, the focus of interest at the moment lies in the final configuration and sales prospects of the L-300B stretched civil freighter. Lockheed are convinced that in about two years' time an immense increase in air freighting will begin, that existing composite passenger/freight aircraft will be increasingly returned to all-passenger transport (because of the growth in passenger traffic), and that they are offering ideal aircraft for commercial freighting. The C-141 has been designed from scratch as a military/civil aircraft, FAA certification being stipulated in the original USAF contract. The USAF stands to recover a proportion of the C-141 development cost from every civil sale, and therefore has a real interest in seeing commercial exploitation. Last year Lockheed accepted that the L-300 as a direct equivalent of the C-141 was not competitive with the 707-320 and DC-8F freighters in terms of operating costs, that the relatively short-field performance specified by the USAF was "too good" for civil requirements, and that the volumetric capacity of the hold was too small to accommodate the usable payload weight at current or expected freight densities. Civil operators, when approached about the L-300 and told of its 6,000ft take-off field length, asked for derated engines with longer overhaul lives, because they could all count on 9,000 to 10,000ft runways. Equally, they were estimating freight densities at between 10 and 13.51b/cu ft, at which the L-300's palletized volume of 6,345 cu ft allowed a payload only slightly better than 60,0001b, compared with the 95,0001b available. Such an aircraft might have been 9,0001b lighter than the C-141 by virtue of the elimination of such military features as an extra-strong floor and certain cargo-door elements. Continued overleaf Heading picture: A Lockheed C-141 freighter for the USAF Military Air Transport Service during an early test flight. A full description of this air- craft was published in this journal on September 20, 1962
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