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During the 1950s, legendary aircraft designer Al Mooney (of Culver Cadet and Mooney Mite fame) went to work at Lockheed.
In 1956-58, he designed the GL-225 light twin-jet transport, with at least sub-variants known, the GL-225-1 and GL-225-4. There is reason to believe that this was a variant of the company's entry in the Air Force's UTX competition, the GL-135 (also of 1956), which evolved into the well-known four-jet JetStar (although Mooney's direct involvement in GL-135 program is not established).
Submitted to the U.S. Navy's Type Specification TS-144, calling for a "Land-based Class VU twin-jet engine four-place aircraft" to be used as a "Personnel Utility Airplane for Maintenance of Individual Training", the GL-225 also appears variously as the M-21, the Opus 21, the Opus Twenty-One or even the Mark 21. It was to use two Continental 717-10B (Arbizon) engines and was apparently considered to be in the same class as the Morane-Saulnier M.S.760 Paris and the North American UTX proposal.
Mooney went on to design two more aircraft for Lockheed: his M-22 was the Lockheed-Aermacchi L-402 or LASA-60 (designed for the Mexican market) while his final design, the M-23, was Lockheed's XV-4B Hummingbird VTOL aircraft. Of course, the designations M-21 to M-23 were later reused by the Mooney Aircraft Corp. for derivatives of the M-20 which had nothing to do with Al Mooney himself.
Has anyone seen a picture of the GL-225?
In 1956-58, he designed the GL-225 light twin-jet transport, with at least sub-variants known, the GL-225-1 and GL-225-4. There is reason to believe that this was a variant of the company's entry in the Air Force's UTX competition, the GL-135 (also of 1956), which evolved into the well-known four-jet JetStar (although Mooney's direct involvement in GL-135 program is not established).
Submitted to the U.S. Navy's Type Specification TS-144, calling for a "Land-based Class VU twin-jet engine four-place aircraft" to be used as a "Personnel Utility Airplane for Maintenance of Individual Training", the GL-225 also appears variously as the M-21, the Opus 21, the Opus Twenty-One or even the Mark 21. It was to use two Continental 717-10B (Arbizon) engines and was apparently considered to be in the same class as the Morane-Saulnier M.S.760 Paris and the North American UTX proposal.
Mooney went on to design two more aircraft for Lockheed: his M-22 was the Lockheed-Aermacchi L-402 or LASA-60 (designed for the Mexican market) while his final design, the M-23, was Lockheed's XV-4B Hummingbird VTOL aircraft. Of course, the designations M-21 to M-23 were later reused by the Mooney Aircraft Corp. for derivatives of the M-20 which had nothing to do with Al Mooney himself.
Has anyone seen a picture of the GL-225?
