Convair photo archives

[bercr]

Hi

i would like to contact the people that maintain the Convair Photo Archives, but i don't know where i have to knock at the door ? Perhaps a archives service at Lockheed Martin ?

I know that the San Diego Air and Space Museum is digitalizing its photos (many Convair Photos) on Flickr and that it is possible to purchase them, but these archive Convair photos are only B&W ones. Since i read the book of Bill Yenne "Convair Deltas" (Specialty Press), i discovered that many and many archives photos of XF-92, YF-102 etc are in COLOUR, and they are fantastic !

So i would like to contact directly the Convair Archives in order... perhaps... i can purchase some of these beautiful colour photos.

Thank you very much

[Dan K]

It is Lockheed Martin that has proprietary right of all things Convair.

I don't know if LM offers a service to fulfill your request. Have you tried asking here?

http://www.lmdtech.com/aboutus/history/ ... index.html


Happy hunting.

[bercr]

thank you very much for the link !

I'll try to send an email.

Thanks

[Ztex]

I have heard that LM cleaned house at Fort Worth some years ago and most of the historical stuff from Consolidated, Convair and General Dynamics was thrown out....

Good luck and let us know what they say.

[Second Air Force]

I can verify what Ztex posted pertaining to the Fort Worth Convair plant.

When we lived in the DFW area in the late '90s my barber and I started talking aviation. It turns out that he worked in the Photo Department at Convair for a number of years from the late sixties to sometime in the seventies. Before he passed away unexpectedly he told me of the big cleanout that took place when LM took over. Several dumpsters full of Photo Dept materials were evidently hauled off during the "cleanup".

If it will help, Gene Pyeatt preserved much wonderful Convair material during his B-36 research.

Scott

[The Inspector]

So far, it appears that only Boeing was perceptive enough to not only keep and catalogue everything they inherited from the takeovers/mergers, they actually solicited via the press, for retirees and others to please send in any pictures they had 'just in case'. I understand they were quick and efficient and returned items in a very rapid manner, unlike 'others' who marched into the targets archives departments and announced 'it ain't OUR history so toss it all out' Witness Republic and Grumman, and out the second story window into the dumpster it all went. Way to preserve history jackasses!!
Many years ago, I converted a REVELL PBY5 straight boat and the tail of a REVELL Cousteau PBY6 into a Boeing of Canada P2B2-2 from an 8X10 obtained from Boeing archives, hows that for mindng the very small stuff?

[bdk]

You might also try General Dynamics as they owned the Convair San Diego area operations (Space Systems Division at the time I worked there as a contract engineer) for quite some time.

[Cvairwerks]

Roger Cripliver, who was the company historian practically forever, accumulated tons of stuff. All of his files were donated to the McDermott Library @ UT Dallas. There is something like 105' of boxes of carefully arranged and cataloged documents, other files and photos of everything Convair/GD built military wise.

As far as I know, during the massive cleanup, the negatives from the photo lab in Fort Worth were not tossed. There were at one time, well in excess of a million negatives if I was reading id numbers correctly. I know that at one time there was some discussion about digitizing them all. From people involved, it would have been a daunting task. The estimate I heard was somewhere around a dozen scanners and computers, 30 or 40 people and more than a year of two shifts a day to do them all.