MPM 1/72 Lockheed Vega 5C (UC-101) by Jim Schubert

History

The Loughead brothers, Malcolm, Allan and Victor, were an ambitious and talented lot. About 1910 Malcolm became interested in aviation and, willy-nilly, his brother Allan and half-brother Victor also caught the bug. They formed their first company, Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company, to build airplanes in 1912. This company began a long chain of Loughead start-ups and failures that ultimately became today's giant Lockheed-Martin, one of only four (Boeing, Bombardier, Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman) significant airplane building companies remaining in North America. The story of the Vega starts with the third venture, the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company of 1916-1921, which built a total of four airplanes: their own design F-1 ten-place, twin-engined, biplane flying boat, two Curtiss HS-2L, single-engined, flying boats and the revolutionary S-1 single-seat, single-engined, sport biplane designed by Jack Northrop. This plane incorporated many innovative features, the most important of which was the two-piece - just like a plastic airplane model kit - molded plywood fuselage. It never sold and the company failed.

Although the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company closed its doors in 1921 and the redoubtable team of Allan Loughead and Jack Northrop were forced to separate professionally, they remained close friends and met often to discuss the future of aviation and to dream. Jack went to work for Donald Douglas and Allan went to work for brother Malcolm selling his new Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Systems for cars and also moonlighted as a realtor to make ends meet. Discussions between Allan and Jack convinced them there was a market for a high speed, five-place monoplane built using their plywood molding process. Allan borrowed start-up money and incorporated, adopting his brother Malcolm's phonetic spelling of their Scots name, as the Lockheed Aircraft Company in 1926 and hired Jack Northrop back from Douglas. Northrop named their new plane "Vega" starting Lockheed's tradition* of celestial names for their planes.

The Vega went through several model numbers and changes from the Vega 1 through 2, 2A, 2D, 5, 5A, 5B, 5C, DL-1, DL-1B, DL-1 SPECIAL, Y1C-12, Y1C-17 AND UC-101 and begat the Explorer, Air Express, Speed Vega, Sirius, Altair and Orion. A total of only 128 Vegas were built by Lockheed, Detroit Aircraft Corporation and others. It's reputation began inauspiciously when c/n 1 (Constructor's Number - it's now called "msn" for Manufacturer's Serial Number), was sold to George Hearst, Jr., of the newspaper family, who entered the bright orange airplane in the August 1927 Dole Race from Oakland to Hawaii. Pilot, Jack Frost, and navigator, Gordon Scott, were the odds-on favorites to win in this impressive, brand new airplane. Lamentably, they disappeared without a trace. Despite this loss, the airplane had already acquired an excellent reputation for good design, and high speed. Because of this most of the "names" of aviation's Golden Age were, at one time or another, associated with the Vega: G. H. Wilkins, Carl Ben Eielson, Art Goebel, Harry Tucker, Bobby Trout, Amelia Earhart, Lee Schoenhair, Ruth Nichols, Wiley Post, Harold Gatty, Jimmy Doolittle, Jimmy Mattern, Bernarr McFadden, Ira Eaker, Harold Bromley and Joe Crosson to mention a few. In addition to the "names" who liked the Vega for record setting, the four to six seat planes were popular with the airlines of the day, including: Braniff, Maddux, Alaska-Washington, Pacific Alaska, Air Express, Transcontinental & Western Air, Universal, Santa Maria, Continental, Nevada, Rapid, U.S. Air, Wedell-Williams, Bowen, Varney, Canadian-American, Alaska Coastal and Alaska Air Transport.

The Kit

Three sprue trees of medium gray injection molded polystyrene carry the 53 parts for this little beauty. One tree of clear parts provides the windscreen/hood unit and 10 passenger cabin windows. There is no resin and no photo-etch in this kit. The kit engineering is conventional and straight forward; the fuselage and wings are in the usual halves and the tail group components are molded as one piece units. As usual, there are no locating pins and no tabs or plug-ins for assembly. You should reinforce all of these butt-joints with metal pins for strength. My example has no shrink holes and no flash. The molding looks good with the flying and control surfaces all having acceptably thin trailing edges. The wooden Vegas had no panel lines making for a very clean, aerodynamically slippery airplane. A very few Vegas had aluminum fuselages so be careful in researching the particular airplane that you chose to model. Simple, but adequate seats - as you can't really see them are provided for the interior. MPM also give us separate left and right doors to cater for different specific airplanes not provided for in the kit. By their treatment of the nose of the fuselage MPM have given themselves the flexibility to offer some of the very early Vegas with no cowling enclosing the engine. I certainly hope they do this as there were some historically very significant Vegas in this configuration.

The eight pages of instructions are printed on two folded A-4 size sheets and include a brief history of the type in Czech, English, German and French, a parts map, a well illustrated seven step assembly sequence and a page each of colors and markings guides for the two sets of markings included in the kit along with a page of advertising. The well printed decals provide markings for only two planes; Vega 5C, c/n 203, NC-13705 sold to Shell Oil for Jimmy Doolittle in yellow and red and Vega 5C, c/n 210, NC-14236 sold to W. P. Fuller and later impressed by the U.S. Army and redisignated UC-101 in OD over grey; this was the last Vega built. At least MPM gave us one set of civil markings. Beware, however, the wheel pants provided for the Doolittle/Shell plane are only applicable to Vegas fitted with low pressure tires. Most Vegas had narrow, large diameter high pressure tires, which required the much larger - better looking - wheel pants that are characteristic of the Vega. Check your references. If you still have your copy of the old Rareplanes vac kit of the Vega, you can use the wheel pants from it for the common high pressure tires.

My only nitpicks are:

€ The propeller provided is, unfortunately, neither fish nor fowl. Most Vegas had a Hamilton-Standard ground adjustable metal propeller. Some early birds had a Hamilton or Reed, non-adjustable prop and later many were fitted with Ham-Standard or Smith variable pitch props. Aeroclub has nice H-S ground adjustable and variable pitch props to correct this; you'll have to modify a prop to get a Smith if your chosen airplane was so equipped. Again - check your references to avoid a gaffe.

€ The UC-101 chosen for the box art is possibly the only dull, uninteresting, looking Vega that ever existed. Bad choice! A fellow IPMS-Seattle member did not buy the kit because he was put off by the box art; after examining mine he ordered five!

Conclusion

With this new MPM kit we now have good 1:72 scale kits of the Orion and the Vega. All of the Lockheed single-engined civil planes, Air Express, Explorer, Speed Vega, Sirius, Altair and Orion, were derivatives of the Vega so it should be easy for the Czech kit manufacturers to give us the whole series. I do hope the aftermarket decal makers will jump in and give us markings for some of the more interesting airplanes in this galaxy of 1:72 scale Lockheed single-engines. Jimmy Mattern's Vega 5, c/n 69, NR-869E in its spectacular red, white and blue eagle scheme would be an outstanding choice.

This is a fine kit of a great and historically significant airplane; buy several for your collection. Kudos to MPM for their subject choice and brickbats for their choice of only one civil livery. Please let us have the Air Express with markings for Roscoe Turner's Gilmore Lion special and Frank Hawk's Texaco Special.

I bought the review kit from Emil Meinerich's Skyway Model Shop in south Seattle for $23.95.

References

€ Revolution in the Sky: Richard Sanders, Orion Books, New York, 1988, ISBN: 0- 517-56678-8.

€ Wiley Post, His Winnie Mae and the World's First Pressure Suit; Smithsonian Annals of Flight No. 8: US Govt. Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1971, Stock Number: 047-005-00008-6.

€ IPMS/USA Quarterly, Vol.3, No.3, 1968. The entire 38 page issue is devoted to the Lockheed single-engined family and how to convert the old Lindberg 1:48 scale kit into any airplane in the series. These conversions are applicable to all kits in all scales of Lockheed's singles; a terrific single source reference.

€ IPMS/USA Quarterly, Vol.15, No. 1, 1979. Five page article with three pages of drawings setting out in detail the 1930, 31 and 33 configurations of Winnie Mae.

€ IPMS/USA Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1979. Eleven page article with eight photos and four pages of drawings covering Amelia Earhart's Little Red Bus Vegas.

€ IPMS/USA Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1979. Two letters following up details on Winnie Mae and the Little Red Buses.

€ William A. Wylam's Vega Drawings for Model Airplane News. Wylam drawings have to be approached with caution - these look pretty good.

* Broken when the F-22 was named "Raptor".