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Some
planes are born to be great, like the
Piper Cub, others become great, and if
ever a good example of one of the latter type is needed, the DC-3 is it.
The Douglas Commercial had its genesis back in the early thirties, at a time when commercial aviation was still in the frontier days and when airlines showed a strong preference for three engined designs, for understandable reasons. Sticking a third engine in the nose might have been inefficient – if one of the wing engines failed, most trimotors could barely maintain height – but it gave at least some margin for error at a time when reliability could not be taken for granted and forced landings were relatively commonplace. Air travel was regarded as being so dangerous that until 1937, your life insurance became temporarily void in the US if you boarded an airliner. If you would like a flavor of what commercial flight in these extraordinary times was like, I would suggest Ernest Gann's classic book, Fate is the Hunter.
Anyway, when the skies were ruled by planes of the trimotor generation, Boeing released the twin engined Model 247, a bold move when America was fighting its way clear of the worst economic depression in its history. The 247 carried ten passengers and two crew at up to 180 mph and it represented such a leap in performance that it put the Ford Trimotor out of business. United Airlines ordered the unprecedented number of sixty, tying up Boeing’s production for months ahead. There are a couple of FS2002 247's around (PCA_247.ZIP and B247DUAL.ZIP) which may well work in FS2004, though I haven't tried them - given that this was such a mould-breaking plane, it is interesting that it has received so little attention from simmers - I would have thought the 247 was a natural for one of the more forward thinking freeware groups.
Aaaah, I can hear the mental wheels clicking away – why am I not writing about the 247 as a great airplane? Well, perhaps I might do a piece about it one day, but the 247’s importance really lay in pointing out what could be done, and the design was eclipsed by the DC-3 in the same way that the De Havilland Comet was by the 707. In the Comet’s case, a potentially great plane fell victim to an unforeseen engineering problem; the 247 had the misfortune to be killed off by that big United order. The other airlines only took so much of United’s pilots thumbing their noses at their schedules as they sped past, before they began a determined search for an alternative supplier. In the end, it was Jack Frye, vice president of operations of the newly formed TWA, who decided that the solution was to commission the design of a better airplane. Frye set out a requirement for a twelve seat airliner, capable of cruising at 146 mph, climbing at 1000 feet per minute up to 21,000 feet and to have a range of more than a thousand miles – twenty five per cent greater than the 247. None of this seemed impossible, but the kicker was that TWA’s advisor, Charles Lindbergh, insisted that the aircraft should be capable of hauling out a full payload from any of the existing airfields used by the carrier – on one engine.
Despite
the challenges involved, Donald Douglas had always dreamed of creating such
a plane, but until then, the market had been too limited to justify the effort
and it looked like Boeing had beaten him to it anyway. But when Frye’s
letter landed on his desk, Douglas got his design team together and hot footed
it up to New York (for TWA textures for the default DC-3 try
TWADC3.ZIP). Three
weeks of hard negotiating followed, at the end of which Frye signed on the dotted
line for delivery of a Douglas Commercial One – the DC-1 – and an
option for sixty more. I guess the point was not lost on United.
It turned out that only a single DC-1 was ever produced. It was a fine airplane, powered by two supercharged nine cylinder 710 hp Wright Cyclones and it had a heated, soundproofed (well, by the standards of the time, anyway) cabin, with a retractable undercarriage and a multicellular wing structure. At rollout it was the biggest twin engined monoplane land plane ever built in the US.
The first flight was kind of adventurous, because somehow the carbs had gotten mounted in such a way that every time the nose was raised, the fuel flow stopped and the DC-1 later suffered a freak wheels up landing, but otherwise it fulfilled every expectation and TWA went ahead and confirmed its order, though with some improvement, the model being changed to DC-2 to reflect this. The DC-2 had variable pitch props, which gave a cruise speed of nearly 180 mph and it carried 14 passengers in unheard of comfort; by comparison, Boeing’s 247 was a bone-shaker and the main spar which split the cabin made it look like a dinosaur. In a master-stroke by TWA, you could even watch airborne movies if you flew by DC-2, albeit ones projected onto a shaky screen precariously balanced at the front of the cabin. United’s victory was now dust, the only fly in Douglas’ ointment being that the first 25 hulls off the line made it a net loss of $266,000. However – with the notable exception of United, which was engrossed in a vain attempt to upgrade its 247s – customers were lining up to buy this exceptional new airplane, including a number of foreign customers. One of these was KLM, which entered a DC-2 in the 1934 England to Australia air race and came second, beating a Boeing 247 and triggering even more orders. One year after the DC-2 went into service, it was flying more than a quarter of all passenger traffic in the USA and Douglas was catapulted into the position of the largest builder of commercial aircraft in the world. By the time production ceased, around 200 DC-2s had been built. If you want to try a DC-2, there is an excellent FS2000 freeware version (DC2-PACK.ZIP) and an FS2002 upgrade (DC2FS2K2.ZIP), but no FS2004 version as far as I am aware.
There
things might have stood, had not American Airlines stepped into the picture
(AADC3.ZIP
is a great set of textures, but don't look too closely at the serial
on the right hand side of the tail]. American was newly formed from the wreckage
of the old American Airways and it had a requirement for a stretched version
of the DC-2, to be used for overnight sleeper flights carrying 14 passengers.
As it turned out, although the Douglas Sleeper Transport order was fulfilled,
it triggered another, more important one, for a 21 seat daytime variant.
American’s interest turned out to be very fortunate for Douglas. Though the DC-2 was better than the Boeing 247, it had its share of problems – chief among these were that it was directionally unstable and difficult to land, but it was also nose heavy and suffered from icing problems. But the real killer was that its payload was inadequate for important routes like New York-Chicago. The engineers thought long and hard about American’s requirement and came to the conclusion that the solution was to widen and lengthen the DC-2 fuselage, increase the wing span and tail area, beef up the landing gear and stick in some more horsepower, but Donald Douglas was reluctant to do it when the DC-2 was selling as well as it was doing. Little did he know how many hulls of the new design – the DC-3 – he was going to make. Douglas delayed making a decision until one historic evening when C.R. Smith, the president of American, rang him and said the airline would order 20 hulls if Douglas would build them and that was enough to tip the balance (an interesting addendum to this is that Smith didn’t have the money to pay for his order, so American ended up taking a loan for $4.5 million from the New Deal Reconstruction Finance Corporation). It goes to show how finely balanced finance was in those days, though a mere five years later, war would change everything.
So Douglas went to work and they spent a great deal of time trying out wing sections in the Guggenheim Tunnel at the Californian Institute of Technology, while they prayed that Wright would deliver on their promise to get the more powerful R-1820-G Cyclone running, though ultimately the majority of DC-3s ended up being powered by Pratt and Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasps. On December 17, 1935, the first Douglas Sleeper Transport flew and it wasn’t long before American were advertising 200 mph coast to coast flights with only two refuelling stops. When you bear in mind that a Boeing 247 had to make up to seven stops on a similar journey, you can understand why C.R. Smith got so excited. A few problems still remained to be sorted out, notably stability on approach, which was solved by fitting a dorsal fin fillet and there were cooling and brake problems, but they all got fixed and the result was a plane that could carry three times the payload of a Ford Trimotor for much the same cost. It never made it as a sleeper transport, but by gosh, Douglas’ new baby made up for it as a day passenger airliner - more than 11,000 DC-3s were built between 1935 and 1946, of which something like 10% are still flying, which isn’t bad going for a plane that arguably only got built because United cornered Boeing 247 production. None of this takes away from the fact that the DC-3 is a superb airplane, but sometimes designs can be slow to mature and fate has a strange sense of humor at times. When you fly the FS2004 DC-3, which is a fine simulation, reflect that Boeing must have thought they had it made when they rolled out the 247 and yet their victory was turned to ashes by the coincident interests of three men: Donald Douglas, Jack Frye and C.R. Smith. Names to be remembered.
Andrew Herd
