The airline business is a hundred years old. In that time uncountable airliners have been conceived, designed and built but, for all their diversity, less than a hundred types have ever sold in large numbers and, unlike military aircraft, only a handful are truly iconic. The shortlist, in fact, is so brief (rarely more than six) they can be named in a sentence. Because such rankings can spark passionate debates among the cognoscenti, I shall leave you to write your own. All I will say is that you will be hard-pressed to leave out one of the few commercial aircraft that still stirs hearts across the world: Lockheed’s graceful