Airline

In the world of guitars, the term "airline" is used to refer to Valco Airline Guitar. Valco was a manufacturer of guitars, guitar amplifiers, and other musical instruments. The company was founded in the 1940s and ceased operations in the year 1967. Valco manufactured the Airline Guitar series between 1958 and 1968. The series was marketed and sold by Montgomery Wards.

The National Valco Airline guitar was produced between 1964 and 1968. The National Valco Airline has a red Res-O-Glas body and a wooden bridge, and comes with dual humbucking pickups. The guitar has a short scale and a painted wooden neck, which features a no-name open back tuner and a rosewood fretboard. The guitar’s Res-O-Glas body was made from two thin halves of a hollow fibreglass shell, which covered a narrow solid wood core. The pickups, neck, tailpiece, and controls were all anchored to this wooden centre block. The edges of the front and back fibreglass sections were connected together by a continuous bead of flexible vinyl. The National Airline Valco guitar was perhaps most noted for its deep lacquer finish, a colour otherwise difficult to obtain. The Montgomery Ward Airline was produced between 1965 and 1966. It too featured a Res-O-Glas body and had the same underlying structure as the National; it was different in the way that it featured truss-rod equipped neck and its three pickups were single coils and not hambuckers. However, perhaps the best in the Airline series was the J.B. Hutto Airline Res-O-Glas Jetson Guitar, made by Valco around 1966.