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View Full Version : How do I find info on historic Electra JR NC 2072?


costalpilot
3rd Aug 2013, 22:08
Lockheed Pictures (http://electrajr.com/)

My friend and classmate Joe Shepherd (Southern Airways Pilot Class, 1969) painstakingly and artfully restored AC# NC 2072, a 1936 Electra Jr 12A. The plane has won many prestigious awards (Sun n Fun and Oshkosh) since Joe and a few friends personally completed the 19 year restoration in 2009, and it has been featured in two movies ("Amelia" and "42").

Joe has in his possession a letter from a deceased aviation enthusiast which states that these three aviation giants at one time FLEW this aircraft:

Orville Wright
Charles Lindberg
Howard Hughes

(among others)

We would like to find and if possible document the history of this aircraft. Hopefully we will be able to locate logbooks, or other information about the history of the airplane.

We know it was originally purchased by Harold Elstner Talbott, who was a Dayton Ohio Banker, business associate of the Wrights, 3rd Sec. of the Air Force and a major player in the development of aviation in America. It was then sold to The Texas Company, which became Texaco.

We are novices at this kind of research and are just beginning the search, so we would greatly appreciate ANY suggestions, comments and/or assistance in this task.

Please post responses here and/or email us at: [email protected]
[email protected]

Thanks Very Much,

Richard Speer
PO Box 519 Nehalem, Or
97131

barit1
4th Aug 2013, 12:11
Richard and Joe:

You say you are novices at this kind of research, but it seems to me you've done quite a bit already on NC2072. Good show!

Allow me to introduce myself - 39 years ago I published one of the first detailed articles on the 12-A (Journal of the American Aviation Historical Society, 1974). Bill Larkins provided most of the photos, and I assembled the story and production list and tried to make some sense of it all. They may still have copies for sale. Try American Aviation Historical Society (http://aahs-online.org/)

That article is badly in need of updating - I'd like to stay in touch with what you discover and bring the story back to life. In case you didn't know, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the 12-A had outsold the Twin Beech by 2:1, and Lockheed still had unfilled orders for the Netherlands military (model 212, roughly equivalent to the AT-11). But Lockheed was rapidly growing with work on Lodestars, Hudsons, Lightnings, Connies, and a hush-hush jet project. The War Dept. and Lockheed agreed to terminate the Model 12 and transfer the unfilled orders to Beech.

Tom / barit1

costalpilot
4th Aug 2013, 16:10
thanks Tom. I will definitely pursue those ideas,. Thanks for the history, which I didn't know. If you have any further ideas, plz keep em coming. They are most appreciated. For some reason I can't (so far) find an obit for Talbott, but I haven't tried the obuious, the NY Times, although I did subscribe to ancestry ----without result??

barit1
4th Aug 2013, 18:26
There's a wee bit more history hidden in this pprune thread: http://www.pprune.org/aviation-history-nostalgia/515041-malaya-pre-62-a.html