Convair: B-24 Liberators, the 10-Engine B-36 and the Atlas-Centaur Rocket

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Convair, formally Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, was formed in 1943 when Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft merged to meet wartime demand. It ranked fourth among U.S. corporations in wartime production contracts, ahead of Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. With its contractors it built about 18,500 B-24 Liberators, still the most produced bomber and the most produced American military aircraft, plus over 4,000 PBY Catalinas. General Dynamics bought the company in 1953. Convair pioneered the delta wing in the U.S. with the F-102 Delta Dagger, F-106 Delta Dart and B-58 Hustler, and built the B-36 Peacemaker, the largest land-based piston bomber, with six pusher propellers and four jets: six turning and four burning.

Its jet airliners, the Convair 880 and 990, were smaller but faster than the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, and airlines balked at the fuel burn; only 65 and 37 were built, and Convair became a fuselage subcontractor for McDonnell Douglas. Its rockets fared better. The Atlas, revived in the 1950s as a liquid-fueled ICBM, launched John Glenn's Friendship 7 in 1962, and the Centaur upper stage was the first widely used rocket to burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Atlas-Centaur launched Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Between 1992 and 1994 General Dynamics sold the divisions to Hughes Aircraft, Martin Marietta, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas, and by 1996 the remaining entities were deactivated.

• The Atlas used stainless steel balloon tanks so thin they had to stay pressurized to avoid collapsing.
• Convair developed the CORDIC algorithms, which compute trigonometric functions with addition, subtraction and bit shifting and are still used in calculators.
• The Kearny Mesa complex was demolished for homes and office parks.
• The Lindbergh Field plant where B-24s were assembled became a consolidated rental car facility for San Diego's airport.
• The July 1994 end of the MD-11 fuselage contract moved the last manufacturing out of San Diego, where Convair had employed 18,000 people.