The Airplane - Jay Spenser [56]
That left Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California, to provide Smith’s sleeper airplanes. The DC-2 also was too narrow for berths, but Smith had a solution to propose: redesign the DC-2 with a wider fuselage. As American envisioned it, the airplane would carry fourteen passengers as a sleeper or twenty-one passengers in day-plane configuration.
Widening an existing airplane is a very expensive proposition—it essentially means a new airplane—and Douglas, which was already selling as many airplanes as it could build, reasonably said no. However, Smith remained adamant, promising large orders and going so far as to secure external financing. Swayed by these inducements, Douglas finally agreed.
Douglas engineers gave this model a rounder fuselage that was wider and a bit longer than that of the DC-2. They also increased the wing area, gross weight, and engine power. The result was the Douglas Sleeper Transport, or DST, which in a day-plane layout was called the DC-3.
The Douglas DC-3 first flew on December 17, 1935, thirty-two years to the day after the Wright brothers succeeded at Kitty Hawk. It went on to change the world by offering a magic combination of payload, performance, and operating economy. Human beings had created an airliner that let its operators make solid profits even without airmail or other subsidies. No other airliner in history has ever been as dominant as the DC-3, which put the fledgling airline industry firmly on its feet.
With the coming of World War II, Douglas suspended commercial production and revised the DC-3 for wartime use. The U.S. military services called these twin-engine workhorses the C-47, C-53, or R4D. British and Commonwealth forces called theirs the Dakota, or less formally the Dak or Gooney Bird. Flying in all parts of the world, from Arctic tundra to tropical airstrips, these rugged airplanes proved crucial to the war effort. Without them, the United States and its allies could not have staged logistically around the globe.
World War II had two effects on commercial aviation. The first was the construction of countless airfields across the world, which laid down a global infrastructure for commercial flying when it resumed after the war. Flying-boat airliners, which pioneered transatlantic and transpacific flying in the 1930s, were left with no real role to play in the postwar world.
By accelerating the development of flight technologies, World War II also gave rise to a new generation of four-engine propeller transports. Among these great ocean-spanning piston airliners of the latter 1940s and 1950s were the Douglas DC-4, DC-6, and DC-7; Lockheed Constellation series; and Boeing 377 Stratocruiser. Many still fly in far-flung corners of the globe, although generally as cargo planes rather than passenger airliners.
Also still in the air are hundreds of DC-3s. Although the vast majority of these airplanes were built as military transports and are thus not true DC-3s, that famous airliner’s designation is broadly applied to all surviving examples. Barring corrosion or damage, the wings of these robust workhorses never grow weary.
Introduced in 1956, the DC-7C “Seven Seas” was the last Douglas piston airliner.
Museum of Flight, Seattle
With the structural challenges of wings solved, the next major leap forward came on the aerodynamics front. This was the development of swept wings for high-speed flight. Together with jet engines, wing sweep would further revolutionize aviation.
During World War II, some fighter pilots encountered inexplicable instabilities during all-out dives at full power that took the propeller fighter plane to or beyond its redline (maximum permissible) airspeed. As the airplane approached 70 percent the speed of sound, the airflow being accelerated over the tops of the wings and horizontal tail surfaces became locally supersonic. Shock waves formed that pushed the center of pressure farther aft, adversely affecting overall aerodynamics.
From the pilot’s perspective the results were absolutely spooky. Seemingly with a