HB-ICB Convair 990 Coronado
(c/n 11)
Another of Jennifer Gradidge's London Airport
shots. Circa 1963. Swissair ordered eight
Convair 990s in 1962 and dubbed them "Coronado", a name which stuck and
was then more
or
less universally used. Several of them were leased out
almost immediately to SAS. The
990 was
an effort by General Dynamics to upgrade the Convair 880 (extra
capacity, basically)
although
despite the sales pitch that the aircraft was faster than its
contemporaries, the design
was too late
on the scene to make an impact on a market which had already been
captured by
Boeing
and Douglas. HB-ICB was delivered in 1962 and
scrapped in 1974.