3 rare airliners from '50s sold

Three historic piston-engined airliners, among the last built before the jet engine changed commercial aviation, have been bought by a division of the German airline Lufthansa for a total of $748,000.

Maurice Roundy had been trying for years to make at least one of the Lockheed Constellation Starliners airworthy again, but the planes were sold Tuesday as part of a bankruptcy auction.

Hundreds of four-engine Constellations, known affectionately as the "Connie," were produced by Lockheed starting in World War II. Roundy's planes were among 44 L-1649A Super Constellation Starliners built in 1957. The only other one still intact is in a museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Lufthansa was an original owner of one of Roundy's planes and the other two had been luxury airliners for TWA.

"This was the last big piston-powered airliner," said Al Caruso, chief operating officer for Portland-based Maine Aviation Corp. "It was fast, almost 300 miles an hour. For the time, it was very advanced."

However, Connies and other piston-powered airliners were outmoded within a few years when the jet engine became the standard for commercial flight. Most Starliners were scrapped, and the three that Roundy owned had been converted into freighters and abandoned before he found them.

Roundy kept two of the Starliners, with 150-foot wingspans, on his property next to the Auburn airport. He kept the third at the Fantasy of Flight Museum in Polk City, Fla.

A Lufthansa spokeswoman, Jennifer Urbaniak, said the buyer is a Berlin-based foundation within Lufthansa's aviation group.

"They essentially seek to preserve and restore and operate older aircraft from the Lufthansa fleet," said Urbaniak. She didn't know what specific plans the foundation has for the Starliners.

___

On the Net:

Roundy: http://www.starliner.net/

Constellations: http://www.conniesurvivors.com/