Detroit-Lockheed Orion 9C Special: The one that got away

Flight Journal, Aug 1998 by Bodie, Warren

The salesmanseen in the stifling cockpit of an ultrarare Orion 9C Special-looked down at young photographer Warren Bodie and offered him the airplane for $2,500. Unable to convince his wife that it was a good investment, Bodie had to "let it get away." Some events live in your mind forever.

In the late 1920s, Jack Northrop designed the all-wood Lockheed Vega/Air Express/Explorer/Sirius airplanes with Alan Loughead (pronounced Lockheed). They were fast and great-looking and featured, among other things, molded-plywood fuselages. Detroit Aircraft Corp., of which Lockheed in Burbank, California, became a division, built duralumin fuselages to be used in place of the more fragile plywood units. One of Detroit-Lockheed's aircraft-an Altair DL-2A-was leased by Transcontinental & Western Airlines until it was damaged and returned to Burbank in November 1931.

Lockheed designer Richard Von Hake and structures engineer James Gerschler converted the Altair DI-2A into the one and only metal-fuselage Orion 9C Special. This special Orion was purchased by Shell Oil for Jimmy Doolittle (because of Doolittle's persuasion) after his heavily overloaded Vega had been damaged in an unsuccessful takeoff. Shell painted both the repaired Vega and the Orion in company colors, and they served as company aircraft for years. At the time, the 200mph Orion was faster than the world's best standard fighters.

Damaged in an accident in 1936, the 9C Orion was repaired at Parks Air College in St. Louis, Missouri, before being purchased by movie and racing specialist Paul Mantz in 1938. Mantz used it in film work and raced it in the Bendix Trophy events in 1938 and '39.

Many Orions served in the Spanish Civil War after airline and business use in the 1930s. Wearing original Swissair colors, this priceless Lockheed gem now hangs in a museum in Switzerland.

-Warren Bodie

Original civilian color(Photo by Warren Bodie.)