Been busy lately tossing ideas around with our curator about a new permanent exhibit at the Delta Air Transport Heritage Museum to celebrate Delta’s 80th anniversary next June. That means looking at a lot of Delta’s early images, and here’s an interesting one. You see a Delta porter loading passenger bags into a compartment in the nose of a Lockheed 10 Electra, ca. 1937:

Click on this birds-eye view of a Lockheed 10 Electra and you can see how the bag bins were located under the wings and in the nose. You also see that the plane’s interior held 2 pilots, 10 passengers and a rear lavatory.

The Lockheed 10 Electra was a big step forward in modernizing Delta’s aircraft fleet. Delta’s second CEO Charles Dolson, who was a pilot in the 1930s, commented years later that the Electra brought Delta out of the barnstorming era for the first time and raised it to the status of a full-fledged airline.

This was Delta’s first all-metal aircraft. Earlier Delta planes were metal frames covered with a skin of fabric and epoxy. It carried the most modern instrumentation of its day and was faster (cruise speed of 190 miles per hour), larger and more comfortable than the Stinson A and T models it replaced.

To learn more about the Model 10 Electra, including the most famous one owned by Amelia Earhart, visit Lockheed’s website.

Marie Force

Archives Manager