Vega Aircraft Corporation

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Vega Aircraft Corporation was a California-based subsidiary of Lockheed in Burbank. It began in August 1937 as the AiRover Company to build a light aircraft and was renamed Vega in May 1938 to honor Lockheed’s Vega design. The AiRover Model 1 was a Lockheed Altair with a twin-engine Unitwin 2-544 setup driving one shaft. The AiRover Model 2 became the Vega Starliner, but only one prototype was built and it did not go into production.

In 1940, as World War II expanded, Vega shifted to military aircraft. It produced five North American NA-35 trainers under license from North American Aviation. The company then built the Hudson patrol bomber for the Royal Air Force and joined with Boeing and Douglas (the BVD partnership) to produce the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. Of more than 12,000 B-17s built by the war’s end, Vega produced about 2,750. It also built two experimental B-17 variants, the XB-38 and YB-40.

By November 1943, Vega merged back into Lockheed, ending its independent operation. The company played a key role in Lockheed’s wartime production beyond its original light-aircraft mission.