Curtiss Condor 18 Eastern Air Transport 8x10 Photo, Only 6 Ever Built For Sale

Curtiss Condor 18 Eastern Air Transport
8x10 Photo, Only 6 Ever Built
Civil Version of the Curtiss B-2 Bomber, MDC St. Louis 1979 Archival PrintDESCRIPTIONThis 8x10 photograph is part of the Aitken Collection, a large single-owner accumulation of official McDonnell Douglas Corporation reprints produced at the company\'s St. Louis plant in 1979 from its historical negative library. It is an archival print with a documented 1979 paper trail, not an original 1929-30 period press pull, and is priced and represented accordingly. The photograph shows a Curtiss Condor 18, also cataloged in period records as the Model 53 or Condor 20, the six-passenger civil airliner Curtiss adapted from its own B-2 Condor bomber. Only six of these civil Condors were ever built, alongside twelve B-2 bombers for the Army Air Corps, making the type one of the shortest production runs of any Golden Age airliner. This example wears registration NC-825Y and was photographed while in service with Eastern Air Transport, the airline that became Eastern Air Lines in 1934, during the brief window when the Condor 18 flew scheduled passenger routes before the airlines moved on to newer equipment. The period caption card identifies the location as North Beach Field in Queens, New York, the amphibious seaplane base that was later rebuilt into LaGuardia Airport. The reverse carries a typed period caption card crediting photographer D. Russell, a partial MDC St. Louis rubber stamp dated 1979 with a \"negatives not filed\" notation, and the Aitken collection\'s own mailing stamp to Donald and Barbara Aitken of Irvine, California. Scanned at 600dpi so every detail is preserved for your records. This is a single photograph; the additional images in this listing are close-up crops of the same print along with its reverse. Every effort is made toward fact checking and provenance, including background research through news and historical archives. If any listing is incorrect in any way and you\'re unsatisfied with the item, please connect with me and I\'ll make it right. Orders placed before Noon CDT ship same day via Ground Advantage with tracking. Returns accepted on all items exceeding $25 in cost. All shipments receive rigid, professional packaging, sealed and protected in acid free sleeves. Shipping is free and already built into the price, so the BIN price is exactly what you pay, no surprise shipping costs at checkout.CONDITIONClean MDC St. Louis archival print with crisp, high-contrast reproduction and no tears, creases, or surface loss visible in the scans. Corners and edges show no notable wear. The reverse carries the typed photographer\'s caption card, the partial MDC St. Louis date stamp, the Aitken collection\'s mailing stamp, and light period handling marks consistent with a photo that has been catalogued and stored in a collector\'s binder since 1979.

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