Every Jetliner Ever Made: Convair and Dassault

Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order, but with Airbus and Boeing at the end because it wouldn't be fair otherwise. Today we're going to look at Convair of the United States and Dassault of France, who made fascinating airliners notable for being huge flops, because they misjudged the market in subtly different ways.

Before we begin, a picture of a Convair C-131 at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in 1979, which has nothing to do with jetliners but I like it:

CONVAIR (United States)

In 1943 Consolidated Aircraft of New York and Vultee of Los Angeles realised that they loved each other very much. They decided to tie the knot and become The Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, but Convair sounded snappier so that quickly became the official name.

Consolidated was famous for the Catalina flying boat and the B-24 Liberator bomber, while Vultee made the BT-13, which was the USAAF's standard basic trainer during the Second World War. Vultee made almost ten thousand of them. We're talking big military contracts, big government money, and so when the war was over Convair continued to concentrate on warplanes.

In 1953 the company was purchased by General Dynamics, but it continued to operate as an independent unit. In the years that followed Convair became one of those fingers-in-many-pies organisations, with a product range that included anti-aircraft missiles, the F-102 and F-106 supersonic interceptors, a turboprop flying boat, a space rocket - the Atlas - and the staggeringly expensive B-58 Hustler jet bomber.

A Convair F-106 firing an AIM-2 nuclear-tipped missile.

A few things link Convair's post-war jet projects. They were fast! For a while Convair sold the fastest bomber (the B-58), the fastest jet interceptor (the F-106), and the fastest airliner (the 880). And secondly they were all very expensive, extremely specialised, and beset by developmental delays. The F-106 only came about because its predecessor, the F-102, wasn't as fast as Convair hoped, but the company had spent so much money and came so close to specification that the US government gave them a second chance. This was acceptable for government work, but it was a poor fit for the commercial market.

As mentioned passim the Second World War acted as a big reset button for the European aviation industry. Instead of restarting production of pre-war piston-engined designs, Europe decided to skip ahead to turboprops and turbojets. Meanwhile the United States carried on as before, with Douglas and Lockheed restarting production of piston designs. Initially they were successful - between them, the Douglas DC-6 and Lockheed Super Constellation sold over 1,000 units - but by the mid-1950s the US aviation industry found itself in danger of being leap-frogged. In response Boeing gambled on a jet airliner derived from a military contract, Douglas scrambled to catch up with Boeing, and Convair decided it should have a go as well.

Convair's field of expertise was fast bombers and fast interceptors, so the company decided to make a fast airliner, powered by military-style General Electric turbojets. Convair decided that there was space in the market for a fast, regional-to-intercontinental-range airliner aimed at the luxury end of the market. There were even plans to clad the aircraft in a gold-coloured exterior skin, somewhat akin to American Airlines' unpainted aluminium aircraft, but the cost of ensuring that each panel was the same shade of gold was too much and the plan was abandoned.

In retrospect Convair made the same mistake as BAC and Aérospatiale when they developed Concorde. They believed that jet aircraft would continue to be exclusive, that turboprops would continue to service the budget market for decades to come, and that there was a market for a super-fast executive airliner.

In reality there was a market for executive jets, but the demand was met by small business jets rather than full-sized airliners, because business executives generally don't want to share space with ordinary people. Meanwhile everybody else wanted to get to their destination as cheaply and quickly as possible, preferably cheaply.

Convair's design was the CV-880, which made its first flight in 1959, slightly later than the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. In common with the other first-generation jetliners the CV-880 had four engines, which were derived from the General Electric J79, a fuel-guzzling turbojet also used by the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. It had a three-two seating aisle arrangement, versus three-three for the 707 and DC-8, with slightly larger seats than either. Passenger capacity was around 110, about two-thirds that of the competition. Fuel consumption was similar, but with two-thirds the passenger capacity the fuel-cost-per-passenger was higher.

In its favour the CV-880 had a higher cruising speed than the competition. Convair hoped that the shorter journey times would attract an exclusive customer base, and their advertisements promised all-first-class seating, but as far as I can tell only the launch customer, Delta of the United States, actually flew all-first-class, and then only briefly.

In practice the speed differential barely had any impact on timetables. The 880 had a cruise speed around 40mph or so faster than the Douglas DC-8 and Boeing 707, 600mph vs 560mph, which made for good copy, but in practice it only saved time on shorter routes, and then only 15-20 minutes. For trans-continental US flights and international flights abroad the 880 had to make a refuelling stop, which nullified whatever speed advantage it had.

Japan Airlines bought nine CV-880s, using them on short-to-medium routes while the company's Douglas DC-8s flew long-range.

Even in the 1960s airlines cared about fuel economy. The 880 burned roughly the same amount of fuel as a 707 or DC-8 to take two-thirds as many passengers two-thirds the distance in fractionally less time. To make things worse the CV-880's introduction coincided with the launch of the Boeing 720, a cheaper, shortened version of the 707 that still carried more passengers than the CV-880. For the most part airlines realised that the future of jet travel was low-cost mass-market transport, which left Convair without a market.

Convair only sold 65 CV-880s, including an 880M variant with more fuel and improved avionics. The company then switched to the 990 Coronado, which was similar, but had more efficient turbofan engines and a more complicated wing design. After promising their launch customer, American Airlines, that they could make the 990 fly at 635mph, Convair encountered a series of aerodynamic problems that necessitated the addition of unsightly aerodynamic fairings to the 990's wings. American Airlines cut their order to twenty airframes at a knock-down price. A few more orders trickled in, but ultimately Convair only made 37 990s, many of which were later upgraded to the longer-range, less-draggy 990A configuration.

A Swissair CV-990 (right), next to a Douglas DC-8, courtesy the collection of the ETH-Bibliothek, Switzerland.

The second-largest buyer was Swissair, who wanted something larger than a turboprop but smaller than the Boeing 707. Before the oil crises of the 1970s the CV-990 actually made some sense in the European market, particularly in centrally-located Switzerland. There was for a while a business-class market that had benefited from the post-war boom. After the first wave of Convair owners disposed of their 880s and 990s the aircraft had brief second lives as charter jets, where the low purchase price offset the high fuel costs.

In 1970 a US charter airline called Modern Air flew a former American Airline CV-990 from Berlin to Paris as a one-off, men-only busenvogel flight, where the stewardesses wore see-through lingerie. Even in 1970 this was controversial, and Modern Air's owners told the company to knock it off, but I'm writing about it in 2025 so in that one narrow sense it was a success.

A 990, with its distinctive wing design. The overwing pods were designed to smooth the flow of high-speed air over the wings. In addition the inboard pods had extra fuel storage.

Most 990s were withdrawn from service in the wake of the early-1970s oil crisis, although the airframes were apparently very robust, and a few saw out the 1970s as cargo aircraft. The 880 generally outlasted it, but only for a few years. In the end Convair lost roughly half a billion dollars on the 880 and 990 project, which was a lot of money in the 1960s, and never again tried to make a jetliner.

The two types had a good safety record despite their hot performance. There were plenty of crashes, but they were almost entirely the result of crew error, poor weather, mid-air collisions, and an unusually high number of training accidents.

One 880 became famous outside the world of aviation. Top late rock singer Elvis Presley bought a surplus 880 in 1975 and had it converted into an executive transport. He named it Lisa Marie, after his daughter. Following his death it was sold on, and then re-purchased by Presley's estate. In 1984 it made its final flight back to Graceland, where it remains as a museum exhibit.

A Dassault Mercure, courtesy Eduard Marmet

DASSAULT (France)

Dassault came into being in 1947, although its roots were the pre-war Société des Avions Marcel Bloch, named after its founder, Marcel Bloch. The company was nationalised by the French government in 1937. After the fall of France in 1940 the company was taken over by the Germans, who eventually sent Marcel Bloch to Buchenwald as punishment for refusing to help them enthusiastically enough.

Meanwhile Bloch's brother, Darius, fought for the French Resistance under a series of code names. In 1947 Marcel, who survived his wartime treatment, revived the aviation business, calling it Dassault, as a play on his brother's codename Chardasso, itself a play on the French for "assault tank". He even renamed himself Marcel Dassault, because Dassault sounds way cooler than Bloch.

Can you think of another man who named two different aviation companies after himself, using two different names? Neither can I. In the mid-1950s Dassault developed the Mirage III, a classic multi-role jet fighter with a distinctive delta-winged design. The Mirage III set up Dassault for life, and the company still exists today as an independent entity. Dassault also designed a series of business jets, which are outside the scope of this article, although the Falcon 900 is notable for being the last trijet in series production.

Dassault also made an airliner, the Mercure. It was a disaster. And yet it wasn't a terrible idea. It was developed in the late 1960s as a short-range, high-capacity twinjet that would compete with the Boeing 737 and Douglas DC-9. The initial plan was to engine it with what would become the Snecma/CFM M56, but development of that powerplant was extremely protracted, so Dassault picked the Pratt and Whitney JT8 instead, essentially the same engine that powered the 737 and DC-9. As a result the Mercure had the same amount of engine power as the competition, but it was heavier, and as a result it burned more fuel.

It also had smaller fuel tanks, because Dassault believed there was a gap in the market for a jet that would carry more passengers than the 737 and DC-9. The Mercure had a capacity of around 160 passengers, versus 120-130 for the competition, but the larger passenger cabin meant that most of the fuel had to be carried in the wings, and there was no room to add extra fuel tanks to the fuselage.

There aren't many public domain photographs of the Dassault Mercure. This is Freddie Mercury (left) of the rock band Queen, plus the rock band Queen (pictured).

The Mercure had an unusually short maximum range of around 1,000 miles, about half that of the contemporary Boeing 737 models, and only then with a reduced passenger load. It was essentially a giant regional jet. The project was announced in 1969, with the French government contributing over half the development costs, but it was an international co-production, with the fuselage made by Fiat of Italy and CASA of Spain, the engines by Pratt and Whitney of the United States, and the avionics by SABCA of Belgium. Had the Mercure been a huge success it would have been interesting to see how Dassault might have co-existed with Airbus, which was then in its formative stages.

On paper the Mercure wasn't awful. Despite being heavier than the 737 and DC-9 it was faster, thanks to some clever aerodynamic engineering. The configuration was state-of-the-art, with a heads-up display, a cockpit optimised for just two crewmembers, and autoland capability. On a visual level it was a tidy design that resembled the Boeing 737 or the later Airbus A-320. The project was apparently brought in on time and on budget, and it was certified for flight in 1974.

Sales were slow at first. Disastrously so, not helped by a major oil crisis. Launch customer Air Inter of France ordered 10 Mercures, which began revenue service in 1974. Air Inter operated the aircraft mostly on internal routes from Paris to the south of France and back, but despite trouble-free service the Mercure was met with a hubbub of apathy from other airlines. Dassault failed to sell any more Mercures throughout the entire rest of the 1970s.

A view of Earth, from the Mercury 3 mission.

But there was a happy ending. In 1983 Air Inter asked for one more Mercure, so Dassault upgraded one of the prototypes to production status, bringing the total number of Mercure sales to eleven. And so Dassault managed to sell Mercures in two separate decades. Admittedly this didn't do anything to help Dassault's bottom line - the company hoped to sell three hundred Mercures, but in the end it only managed to sell eleven - but eleven is bigger than ten, isn't it? There was also a twelfth Mercure, a prototype, but no-one wanted it.

Why did the Mercure fail? The oil crisis didn't help. The existence of the Boeing 737 and Douglas DC-9 was a major issue. By 1974 those aircraft were well-established. The Mercure's position as the first airliner from a new manufacturer was a tough sell. The contemporary, brand-new Airbus A-300 languished for several years before Eastern Air Lines of the United States bought a bunch, but no-one came to the Mercure's rescue. As far as I can tell Dassault didn't market the type in the United States. Given the short range, the company would presumably have had to transport a sample aircraft across the Atlantic by cargo ship.

The key problem was a total lack of flexibility. The Mercure only made a profit if it carried a two-thirds-full passenger load over a distance of around 600 miles, which - again, on paper - wasn't necessarily a disastrous proposition. The problem is that no airline beyond Air Inter was interested in an aircraft that could only do that one, narrow thing.

This man invented time.

Had the Mercure emerged a decade later it might have attracted the attention of the nascent low-cost airline industry - passenger capacity was similar to the 1980s-onwards New Generation 737s - but even then the likes of Ryanair and EasyJet would have been unhappy with an airliner that couldn't fly from Dublin to Rome without a refuelling stop. London-Dublin, or Dublin-Edinburgh, or perhaps London-Paris was within the Mercure's reach, but London-Benidorm was out of the question, so it was useless for the British package holiday market.

The likes of Swissair and Lufthansa, whose home bases are centrally placed within Europe, opted for smaller Embraer regional jets instead. As a final nail in the coffin the introduction of France's TGV high-speed rail network in the 1980s removed whatever raison d'etre the Mercure had within France.

An airline that bought the Mercure would have found itself trapped, unable to expand. Dassault mooted a longer-ranged, more efficient Mercure 200, but the project went nowhere, which in retrospect is one of the big "what-ifs" of the aviation industry, because the conceptually similar Airbus A320 went on to be one of the best-selling airliners of all time.

The Mercure remained in service with Air Inter until 1995, shortly before the company was absorbed into Air France. The irony is that during its twenty years of service it had a fantastic safety record, with no crashes and no deaths. In 1986 one Mercure was battered by a hailstorm, forcing the pilot to lean out of a side window to see the runway, but no-one was seriously hurt. Along with the Vickers VC-10 and Hawker Trident it's an interesting example of a technically clever airliner that was laid low by an inflexible specification.

An actual Dassault Mercure, courtesy Dylan Agbagni.

In the 1980s the Mercure was occasionally cited as an example of the failure of the European aviation industry to compete with the US, and during the early years of the Airbus project it was widely assumed that the A-300 would go the same way, but Airbus survived its early fallow period.

Next, Douglas. Many years ago this series of articles would have been titled "every jetliner ever made, but with Airbus, Boeing, and Douglas at the end, otherwise it wouldn't be fair", because Douglas was a giant. And then it was gone. Except that it still existed. But it wasn't Douglas any more. Or was it?

Of Late I Think of Schonefeld

It's not often I write about the airports of Berlin, but something about Schonefeld moves me. Everybody hated Schonefeld, and now it's an empty shell, but I miss it.

"Faster, Schonefeld", said Thom Yorke. He said it three times. But Schonefeld was not there.

Schonefeld's buildings are still in good shape, but they're all boarded up. The car park is empty. The only departures are buses that connect the terminal building to Rudow and points north. There's an airport hotel just across the road, but why? The curved walkway that links the terminal building to Schoneberg's S-Bahn station is still there, and so is the station, but the circus has left town.

For the record, the full title of this blog post is Of Late I Think of Schonefeld: Aria on Gaze ([REDACTED] Your Head). Following legal action from NBC and the estate of George Peppard I had to rewrite the title. Some reference works erroneously give this post a ZTT catalogue number, but they are wrong. It has no formal connection with ZTT Records. Beware counterfeits of this post that miscapitalise the word "of".

What is Schonefeld? It's a defunct international airport south of Berlin, just outside the city limits. Berlin has an unusual amount of defunct international airports. Three, as far as I can tell. Tempelhof was photogenic and historic, but it was just too small, so it closed in 2008. The enormous terminal building is still intact. The runways are now a huge urban park.

Of all Berlin's airports, Tempelhof is the only one that has a romantic aspect. It's the rock star of the bunch. It opened in the 1920s, but it was vastly expanded by the Nazis during the 1930s. They built an enormous terminal building that spread across several city blocks.

Adolf Hitler was not fond of Berlin. It was too cosmopolitan for his tastes. He wanted to knock it all down and replace it with a new city, Germania, and Tempelhof was to be its gateway to the world. Hitler had a vision of gentle aeroplanes softly landing on Tempelhof's grass airstrips, bringing and spreading love, from Germany to everywhere. Liebesstation Tempelhof. That was his vision.

This is the Schwerbelastungskörper, a lump of concrete that was built in order to see whether Berlin's marshy ground could support Hitler's vision of Germania. It could not.

I don't want to give the wrong impression, dear reader, but if I had not known that Tempelhof was the dream of a bunch of strutting warmongers I would not have guessed. It's expansive, but not especially imposing. The overall design is rigid and geometric, but in a pleasingly minimalist way. Even in the rain the warmly-coloured limestone walls are attractive. Templehof looks more modern than the Brutalist buildings of a decade later. It does not look ninety years old.

Tempelhof was a vital lifeline during the Berlin Blockage, and then for a couple of decades it was a popular commercial airport, until in 1975 most flights moved to Tegel. From 1975 until 1981 it was exclusively used by the US military, after which commercial flights were reinstated. For the rest of its life it was a small-scale commuter airport akin to London City, too small for international operations but with a killer location right in the middle of Berlin.

After the end of the Cold War its days were numbered, but it took until 2008 for Berlin's government to actually close the place, and even then there was widespread public opposition. Now it is a park, and despite attempts to redevelop the area it still has something of the "poor but sexy" Berlin of the 1990s. I checked it out in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, which gets the general outline right but has an odd-looking control tower:

Tempelhof is also a refugee centre. When I visited in 2015 the refugees were housed inside the terminal building, but now they're in a fenced-off area just outside. They are happy there.

Moving swiftly on, there's also Tegel. I don't know a thing about Tegel. I've never been there. According to the internet it was constructed by the French in the post-war years. During the Cold War it was Berlin's main international airport. Nothing of note happened at Tegel and it closed in 2021. Tegel. Insert brief history of Tegel here. No-one seems to have had any feelings for Tegel, either pro or con. RIP in peace, Tegel.

Berlin also had Gatow, in West Berlin, which was technically an international airport but was only used by the Royal Air Force, and Stakken Humanoid, which was used during the Weimar years as a base for Zeppelin flights to London, and Johannisthal, which was Berlin's very first airport, but doesn't seem to have ever had scheduled international flights. But what of Schonefeld?

I visited Berlin for the first time in 2015. I wanted to tick it off the list of European cities I hadn't visited yet. I was pleasantly surprised by Berlin. You can take bottles and cans back to the supermarket and you get some money back. You don't even have to speak to anybody. You put the bottles and cans into a machine, and it gives you 25 euro cents. It's called the pfand system, after the German word for deposit, which is pfand. Berlin has other things, but that thing stood out.

In 2015 Schonefeld was Berlin's main low-cost airport. It was a Cold War relic that had been built up in the post-war years by East Germany, and then absorbed into post-Cold War Berlin's infrastructure as a low-cost alternative to Tegel. Schonefeld was supposed to close in 2011 to make way for a new airport, Berlin Brandenburg, built on the same site but slightly further south. But Brandenburg was delayed, so Schonefeld had to stay open.

Schonefeld had two problems. I experienced them both first-hand. On the way into Berlin it wasn't so bad, but the airport was never properly integrated into Berlin's public transport system, so the major route into Berlin was an S-Bahn station just outside the terminal. A forbidding, strangely oppressive S-Bahn station with a long underground corridor. For historical reasons Schoenfeld's S-Bahn line had to take a circuitous, counter-clockwise route into Berlin, because the direct path would have crossed the Berlin Wall. And so it took ages to get into the city, even though Schonefeld is only ten miles from the city centre.

Schonefeld showed its true colours on the way back. The airport just didn't have enough space. The airside section was a long, twisty corridor, with fast food restaurants scattered around but only a handful of chairs. My enduring memory is of clumps of people sitting on the benches surrounded by their bags. Once past that area the final section was a walkway that was a good illustration of the adage that there are few things more permanent than a temporary solution. A couple of brave souls on the internet seem to have photographed the very same corridor:

I remember overhearing a young man saying "this is shit", and I wanted to give him a high-five, but I am British so I kept quiet. But I did agree with him.

For a long time Schonefeld was a perfectly ordinary airport. The original field was built in the 1930s to support the nearby Henschel aviation plant. In the post-war years it became part of East Germany. As part of the post-war settlement only the four major Allied powers were allowed to operate commercial flights to Berlin, which meant that East German airlines weren't allowed to fly into the city. But Schonefeld was just outside the city limits, so the East German authorities expanded the airfield and turned it into the hub for East German airline Interflug.

It became the gateway to Berlin for the entire Eastern Bloc, including airlines as far afield as Cubana of Cuba. In addition a few Western Bloc and non-aligned airlines used it as well, and even a few West German airlines that were not allowed to fly to Tempelhof. I learn from the internet that passengers from West Berlin had to take a special bus that went through a checkpoint just next to Schwartzkopffstrasse S-Bahn station.

In theory the airport was doomed the moment the Berlin Wall fell, but it took until the twenty-first century for Berlin's government to start work on a replacement. Construction began on Berlin Brandenburg in 2006, and it was supposed to open in 2011. The terminal was mostly completed by that date, but a variety of issues delayed opening for almost a decade, during which Brandenburg was a ghost airport, with cleaners and security guards but no passengers.

Among other issues it turned out the fire safety system had been designed by an apprentice draftsman who was not a qualified engineer, so the wiring had to be ripped out and replaced. The lengthy modification process coincided with a boom in air travel, which meant that passenger demand overtook the airport's original planned capacity. What would have been suitable for 2011 was inadequate just a few years later, which necessitated the last-minute addition of an entire second terminal.

Overall Brandenburg was a poor advertisement for Berlin. Technically the airport's full name is Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, but the Willy Brandt Foundation cooled on the association, and I have the impression that the state of Brandenburg cooled on it as well, so nowadays it seems to be informally called BER, or "the airport", or "the flughaven", or "der flughaven". The Apple II produced colour graphics by sending patterns of dots to the television in such a way that the dots interfered with the NTSC colour signal. It was fascinating.

Brandenburg finally opened in October 2020, but in a final twist of fate this was during the height of the COVID pandemic. In its first year of operations passenger numbers were around 85% lower than they had been at Tegel and Schonefeld pre-pandemic. In hindsight the pandemic might have been a good thing for Brandenburg. It gave the airport's operators a chance to fine-tune operations with a reduced passenger load. But COVID had one major negative side-effect - it killed off Schonefeld.

As mentioned previously Brandenburg occupies the same site as Schonefeld. It even uses one of Schoenfeld's old runways, with the terminal buildings on the south side of the airstrip instead of the north. There were plans to keep Schonefeld open, as Berlin Brandenburg Terminal 5, with Ryanair as its major client. The walkway that leads from the terminal to the S-Bahn station still has some faded posters that present this as the final evolution of Schonefeld. They gave it a number and took away its name.

But COVID meant that there was insufficient demand. The airport was used as a vaccination station and refugee processing area, and then it was closed. As of 2024 Brandenburg's passenger numbers are still down by around two-thirds compared to Tegel and Schonefeld pre-COVID, so the chances of Schonefeld ever reopening are slim.

The building still exists. Perhaps there will be a huge economic boom, and Germans will stop caring about the environment, and it will open again. The terminal car park has plenty of free space. As mentioned earlier the only scheduled services are buses that go off to Rudow, which has some shops, and if you stay on the bus a little bit longer there's a drive-through McDonalds on the left, which comes in handy on a Sunday when everything is closed. Everything closes in Berlin on a Sunday, remember that.

There's also Schonefeld S-Bahn station. It has around eight lines, but only two of them go anywhere. To the left, Berlin Brandenburg, and to the right Berlin, in a long counter-clockwise motion. The area around Schonefeld has a number of airport hotels and an industrial park, which presumably exist because of the airport, and there's a small village, which again presumably houses people who work at Berlin Brandenburg. I suppose technically the village is the real Schonefeld and the airport is an offshoot of the village.

The former terminal building is an interesting hello-place. It's not a magnetic go-there, but it's peaceful. For a few minutes I made it a yes-happen. As I wandered around I didn't see any security guards. No-one waved me on. Whatever evil once lurked in the heart of Schonefeld had dissipated, and I was at peace with the world.