Eastwood Airline '59 Custom

Airline was a brand of electric and acoustic guitars made in the United States from 1958-68 by the Valco Manufacturing Co., and sold through the Montgomery Ward mail-order retail company. (Valco was known for its flagship National and budget Supro guitar brands, which were in production until the company's demise in 1968.) Today, old Valco guitars are played by a wide array of bands and artists including: David Bowie (deceased), The Cure, PJ Harvey, Calexico and Jack White of The White Stripes. Due to their re-emerging popularity in contemporary rock music and their relative scarcity in the guitar-sale market, original Res-O-Glas guitars (models made with fiberglass bodies) in excellent condition are known to sell for as much as US$1,500-$3,000.

In the world of guitar collecting, the angular red Airline model, sometimes associated with Jack White, is commonly referred to as the "JB Hutto," after the bluesman and slide guitar artist J. B. Hutto. Hutto was the first popular guitarist to regularly use the guitar in live performances and recordings, and is pictured with the guitar on his Slidewinder and Stompin' at Mother Blues albums.

Airline branded amplifiers were also manufactured, initially by Valco and later by Danelectro.

In the early to mid-2000s, the Eastwood Guitar Co. acquired the rights to use the "Airline" brand-name. Eastwood has never been directly affiliated with the long-defunct Valco company. Original Valco Airline guitars were all made in the United States, whereas today's Eastwood Airline guitars are made in South Korea or China.

Though Eastwood Guitars is not affiliated with the modern day National Reso-Phonic guitar company, the early 1960s JB Hutto Montgomery Airline model was reissued by Eastwood Guitars in the early 2000s under the name of the Airline DLX. The reissue has many noticeable structural and aesthetic differences. Most notably, Eastwood guitars are built with chambered mahogany bodies as opposed to the hollow fiberglass (Res-O-Glas) bodies used for the originals. This difference in body materials gives the reissue a much more traditional electric guitar feel and tone, whereas the original Airline is noted for its unconventional playing feel and response. Additionally, the reissue has an adjustable truss rod, accessible from the headstock, while the original had a non-adjustable steel reinforced neck. The aesthetic differences between the original and the reissue include: different tuning heads, (the newer model having greenish knobs, as opposed to the original white knobs), different pickups (original pickups were single coils, often mistaken for humbuckers, whereas Eastwood reissues have actual humbuckers; although Eastwood now offers "vintage-voiced single-coil" (VVSC) units, with large Gibson-style mounting rings), a slightly different shaped pickguard (the original pickguard extended further into the center of the body between the pickups and always included a black stripe along the edge), Gibson-type block inlays on the fingerboard (original inlays were smaller and more rectangular), and finally, original Airlines were usually equipped with white volume and tone knobs, not black like the reissues.

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