The Airplane - Jay Spenser [120]
The result was a spacious, snug, and soundproofed propeller airliner that was smooth and comfortable in flight. And with two stewardesses catering to up to forty-four passengers, it was also the first land airliner to carry more than one flight attendant. This amazing airplane should have been a huge commercial hit for Boeing, but World War II came along and production ended after just ten were built.
For the second time in a quarter century, the demands of a global war accelerated the development of flight technologies. When this conflict ended, a new generation of transport planes far more capable than anything seen before the war had taken wing.
Douglas, Lockheed, and Boeing all brought out civil airliners based on four-engine, tricycle-gear transports they had developed during World War II. These transports would equip airlines around the world except behind the Iron Curtain, where the Soviet Union maintained an active and capable aircraft industry.
The United States then predominated in commercial aviation. Great Britain had concentrated on building fighters and bombers during the war and relied on America for most of its transport planes, as did its dominion countries. In the decades after the war, it brought out many airliner types but found success elusive in competition with the U.S. aviation industry.
As for France and other European nations, they had seen their Nazi-appropriated industrial bases shattered along with Germany’s, dictating a protracted halt to airplane design and development on the continent. Fortunately, this activity has rebounded with the rise to global prominence of Airbus, a collaborative enterprise drawing on the resources and talents of many nations.
Douglas brought out the DC-4, an airliner version of its wartime C-54 transport. It followed that unpressurized type with the stretched and pressurized DC-6, the even longer DC-7 with more powerful engines, and finally the DC-7C Seven Seas, with wing-root extensions that gave it more room for fuel and pushed the engines farther out on the wing to reduce noise and vibration levels in the cabin.
Lockheed, meanwhile, had emerged from the war with perhaps the most beautiful propeller airliner of all time. The Constellation, with its triple tail and greyhound lines, was pressurized from the outset and offered speed and range that Douglas was hard-pressed to match. The DC-7 and late-model “Super Constellations” both used the Wright R-3350 Double Cyclone, whose unreliability hampered their success.
Last to market with a long-range commercial transport was Boeing, which in the late 1940s introduced the largest, heaviest, and most powerful piston airliner of all. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was the only commercial airliner to use the Pratt & Whitney R-4360, the largest piston engine ever produced, which suffered chronic reliability and maintainability issues.
The Stratocruiser employed technology developed for the pressurized Boeing B-29 Superfortress, which had R-3350 engines and was the most advanced airplane to emerge from World War II. At the request of the Army Air Forces, Boeing had given the B-29 a fatter fuselage during the war to produce a pressurized transport plane prototype called the XC-97.
Right after the war, Boeing came out with a considerably improved B-29 with R-4360 engines. So extensively revised was this version that the military gave it the new designation B-50. In parallel with that improved product offering, Boeing incorporated the same changes into its C-97, creating a cargo and air-refueling plane the U.S. Air Force would use for decades. This became the basis of Boeing’s postwar airliner.
The capacious fuselage of the Stratocruiser created an unexpected headache for Boeing. Unlike its earlier airliners with their straightforward