For the past six years, cabin interior specialist and maintenance service provider Lufthansa Technik (LHT, Booth 2289) has been working on a legend. At a specially built hangar at Auburn-Lewiston Airport in Maine, the German company, in conjunction with its Oklahoma-based Bizjet subsidiary, has been painstakingly restoring one of the last remaining Lockheed L-1649A Super Stars with the expectation that it will someday fly again.
The final iteration of Lockheed’s successful Constellation series, the four-engine Super Star was the last word in long-range airborne luxury in the days before passenger jet travel. The aircraft joined Lufthansa’s fleet as flagship in 1958, with four of the aircraft (out of the 44 built) serving on the carrier’s nonstop transatlantic route until they were superceded by the Boeing 707 in the mid-1960s. The aircraft saw the inauguration of the airline’s first-class service with an onboard chef catering to the 32 passengers who endured the nearly 15-hour flight from the comfort of sleeper beds and nearly lie-flat seats.
Lufthansa’s historic Deutsche Lufthansa Berlin-Stiftung (DLBS) flight foundation decided back in 2007 to add a Super Star to its fleet of flying museum pieces such as the Junkers Ju-52/3M and the Dornier 27, in recognition of the aircraft’s role in the airline’s nearly nine-decade history. It purchased three out-of-service airframes and 13 of the mighty R3350 Curtiss-Wright turbo-compound radial engines, along with a trove of spare parts, from a Super Star enthusiast who was forced to abandon his own restoration plans.
Over the past several years, the company’s technicians have disassembled the airframe in a search for corrosion and fatigue, with all systems overhauled with new wiring and control cables. The entire tail section was removed and shipped to BizJet in Tulsa.
While the DLBS had intended to restore the propliner to as close to its original appearance as possible, the fact that the foundation intends to recertify it as a commercial transport, under the same regulations as any other aircraft in the airline’s fleet, meant several compromises had to be made, starting with the cockpit. Clearly the general layout of the instrument panel, which bore little change from its 1930s roots, would not accommodate today’s technology. Simply adding modern instruments to the existing cockpit was ruled out due to the lack of space available on the narrow instrument panel.
A solution was recently reached when the CEOs of LHT and Honeywell met and determined that the avionics suite originally developed for another still-serving four-engine Lockheed aircraft–the C-130 Hercules–would fit the bill, both functionally and physically. The Honeywell suite’s flight management system will provide data to the aircraft’s Bendix PB 20 autopilot and also convert navigation commands into visual displays for the pilots. The modifications will also extend to the overhead panel, which will be reorganized to fit modern airliner standards and refit with modern switches.
Landing Gear Overhaul
The company also recently completed a complete overhaul on the aircraft’s landing gear, which was found to be in a much poorer condition than previously determined by visual inspection.
The repair manuals and production drawings LHT had for the gear were either incomplete or missing altogether, resulting in additional challenges to its staff during disassembly. Some materials used when the aircraft was built more than half a century ago have since been supplanted, such as the nose wheels, which while constructed of magnesium alloy to save weight, were subject to corrosion. Instead, the Hamburg-based company developed a modification to substitute the nose wheels from the Airbus A320.
Other spare parts were no longer manufactured or otherwise available, requiring the engineering staff to machine them. All the repairs and manufactured parts required official approval, and when combined with the brakes and hydraulic systems associated with the landing gear, totaled nearly 80 such authorizations, according to LHT.
Vintage Cabin Mockup
A vintage cabin mockup developed at the company’s Hamburg headquarters is currently being test-fitted in Maine on one of the spare airframes so as to not get in the way of the restoration project. “While the right-hand side of the cabin shows exactly how the original cabin will look in the future, right down to the color scheme, wood-effect foil and curtains, the left-hand side is still in its raw state,” said Burkhard Linke, a project manager on the restoration team. “This technical look lets visitors see the solutions we have come up with for sound insulation, PSU/oxygen, cabin air-conditioning and attachments,” he noted. Special attention was paid to making the interior easy to maintain to lower the aircraft’s upkeep costs for DLBS.
Despite the progress on the project, the company told AIN that “It is still not possible to seriously schedule the maiden flight.”
