When I was in high school, I took a drafting class. I loved the precise measurements, learning the line weights, making a gentle curve, the importance of a good arrowhead, all of it. And I think I was pretty good at it. I was inspired by the illustrations and hand-drawn maps that I saw in my WWII history books, and I hoped to parlay that into a career in cartography, but that didn’t pan out. To this day, I have a deep love of mechanical and technical drawings and illustrations.
These drawings are from a collection titled Convair Negatives held in the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives. They are part of a large trove of drawings and photos surrounding the development of the Convair 240, the pressurized airliner that Convair created to take on the dominance of the Douglas DC-3 after WWII. The initial 240 had seats for 40 passengers flying in pressurized comfort, and the 240 eventually spawned a whole family of “Convairliners” with increasing capacity, power, and range. The converted 240-21 Turboliner was the first commercial airliner in the US to fly with turboprops, and the 580 turboprop variant was flown widely by US airlines and helped start up Frontier Airlines.
What I love so much about these drawings is that they are more than drafting. They are art. They hearken back to a time of pencils and brushes and rulers and French curves, when perspective was more than an algorithm and words were written by hand. They have a warmth and humanity that feels lost to me in the modern era of computers and laser printers. I wish I knew the artist’s name. I’d love to see more of their work.
Connecting Flights
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