DC-3 75th Anniversary

When legendary American Airlines PresidentCyrus Rowlett (“C.R.”) Smith placed the commitment that launched the DC-3 in 1934, he was in “a cold sweat, because he just didn’t have the money to pay for them,” according to Donald Douglas Sr., famed founder of Douglas Aircraft Co. As the airline industry marks the 75th anniversary of the DC-3’s first flight in December 1935, that aspect of commercial aviation has not changed although almost everything else has, in many ways owing to the airplane that taught the world to fly.

The birth of arguably the world’s greatest aircraft was anything but auspicious. In an interview in 1948 with Australia’s doyen of aviation writers, the late Stanley Brogden, Douglas explained that the idea for the DC-3 came when Smith and his chief engineer, Bill Littlewood, were flying in a Curtis Condor.

“Smith wanted to combine the width of the Condor with the technology and speed of the DC-2 and beat the competition with a true transcontinental sleeper plane,” Douglas recalled. After some considerable internal discussion at American involving a wider, longer-range DC-2, Smith spent $300 on a 2-hr. telephone conversation with Douglas about the concept. “I did not like it at all,” Douglas recounted to Brogden. “Why should I have liked it? I had plenty of DC-2s on order. But he said he would give me an immediate order for 20 sleeper DC-2s.” The order eventually was 10 Douglas Sleeper Transports and the balance a new version to be called the DC-3.

As Smith did not have the money, he flew down to Washington to see an old friend, Jesse Jones, who was running the Reconstruction Finance Corp. for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “He talked Jones into a $4.5 million loan. That is how the DC-3 started as the sleeper DC-2,” Douglas recalled. And whereas the standard passenger capacity for the DC-2 was 14, it was 21 for the DC-3, a 50% increase.

However, even by the time of the first flight the management at Douglas seemingly was not aware of the potential for the DST (as it still was called at that time), as apparently no photos were taken of the event. The logbook of the first DST, X14988, records a 3-hr. runup of its Wright Cyclone engines at noon on Dec. 14, 1935. It was repeated two days later.

On Dec. 17, 1935, 32 years to the day after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, Douglas Aircraft Co. Chief Pilot and VP-Sales Carl Cover, accompanied by flight engineers Fred Stineman and Frank Collbohm, boarded X14988 at 2:15 p.m. local time, ran the engines up for about 30 min., and taxied for takeoff at Clover Field in Santa Monica. Collbohm, who occupied the right seat, recalled 40 years later in the McDonnell Douglas Spiritmagazine that “it was just a routine flight. I can’t separate it in my mind from any other test flights we made in those days.”

Chief designer Arthur Raymond, also quoted in the publication, didn’t remember the event either: “When the plane was ready, I suppose Carl and the others simply got aboard and took off.” And take off the DST did at 3 p.m. for a 1 hr. 40 min. flight, landing just as dusk was approaching. With it came nightfall for virtually every other commercial aircraft flying in the world.

The first DST entered service on June 25, 1936, between Chicago Municipal Airport (renamed Midway) and Newark, which like today served the New York market. Passengers paid $47.19 for the 4-hr. flight that was operated by Flagship Illinois. Within three years, 95% of all passengers in the US were flying on DC-2s or DC-3s. By December 1941, Douglas had delivered 507 DC-3s of which 434 had gone to airlines.

At the 40th anniversary of the first flight, Raymond heaped praise on Littlewood’s input to the design: “He was an extremely capable engineer.” Raymond gave the AA employee a virtual free hand in establishing the dimensions of the cabin and deciding what went in it and in the cockpit layout. “We worked together without any friction. Thus the DC-3 was the product of teamwork between the user and the builder.”

Strong Platform 

The design platform upon which the DC-3 was built was itself a quantum leap over the competition, so much so that some thought the DC-2 a fake when design drawings appeared. In 1934, when Roy Fedden, head of Bristol Engines, showed a photo of the DC-2 to the UK Government Technical Directorate Development Staff, they refused to believe it was a real aircraft.

The British press ridiculed KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ entry of its shiny new DC-2 into the MacRoberston Air Race from London to Australia in 1934. They were skeptical that it could compete against the best from Europe. Newspapers described the aircraft’s entry as “American propaganda” and “an audacious assumption that such a ship could expect to compete with the fastest planes and designs from the continent.” But compete it did, and despite carrying a full crew of five together with three passengers, traveling 1,000 nm (1,852 km.) farther and making five more stops to meet the obligations of KLM’s regular Amsterdam-Batavia (Indonesia) service, the DC-2 came in second to a souped-up racing plane, the twin-engine de Havilland Comet, which carried just two pilots.

AA intended the DC-3 to be just a wider version of its predecessor with only 15% new parts, but significant redesign work meant that it ended up with only 10% of its parts in common with the DC-2. The wing was wider, the fuselage longer and wider and the vertical stabilizer larger. While the DC-2 itself was a giant leap forward, it was by no means perfect. According to noted DC-3 historian Arthur Pearcy, the DC-2 had propeller and icing problems, was nose heavy, difficult to land, directionally unstable because its vertical stabilizer was not large enough and had heavy ailerons and rudder. The DC-3 also suffered from a too-small tailfin, which led to a problem with directional stability. A dorsal fillet added to the vertical stabilizer solved this problem.

The technical improvements of the DC-3 over the DC-2 and other contemporary transports are almost too many to mention. American insisted on duplicate instrumentation for pilot and copilot as an added safety measure and new cockpit lighting for night flying. Automatic hydraulically actuated retracting undercarriage was introduced along with foot brakes. The DC-2’s landing gear took 40 strokes of a pump and a full minute to retract whereas the DC-3’s gear retracted in 7 sec. Other innovations included hydraulically operated wing flaps.

The DC-3 also incorporated the major advances pioneered in the DC-1 and DC-2 such as Hamilton Standard Propeller’s variable pitch prop, Jack Northrop’s multicellular wing and clean aerodynamics developed under the guidance of Dr.Oswald of the California Institute of Technology. All these breakthroughs and the sleek design gave the DC-3 unmatched operating economics. According to Pearcy, Douglas in his address to the board of directors in early 1936, just after the first flight, said: “The DST’s payload is one-third more than any of the previous airliners.” More important, he emphasized, “Our estimates show that it costs about 69 cents per mile to operate the plane, which is about on a par with the costs of operating the Ford Tri-Motor. The difference is the DST carries three times as much in payload.” Douglas also informed the board that a modified version of the DST—the DC-3—was moving down the production line.

In fact the DC-3 cost about 71.6 cents per mile in 1939 dollars to operate (around $11 in 2010 using the CPI) compared to the 14-passenger DC-2’s 67.4 cents, but the additional seven seats for the DC-3 meant that the seat-mile costs were 3.4 cents compared with 4.8 cents for the DC-2.

Frost to Flowers 

The performance of the DC-3 was extraordinary. In 1934 AA was operating a service across the US that was taking 38 hr. 30 min. westward. Passengers took the overnight train from New York to Cleveland before boarding a Tri-Motor for a six-stop trip to Dallas. Following that leg was a seven-stop trip in a Condor to Los Angeles. The DST/DC-3 did it in 17 hr. 45 min. from Newark with just three stops. The speed led to clever radio jingles such as Eastern Airlines’ promotion of its New York to Florida route as “Frost to flowers in just eight hours”

Passengers loved the additional soundproofing, with one British trade journal commenting: “Travel in the DC-3 is the most restful affair that can possibly be imagined. The reflections from the wide spread of metal wings and from the discs of the slow running airscrews would send even the most wide-awake European dictator into a pleasant slumber.” The advance in soundproofing, which reduced the noise in the cabin to around 55 dB, was put in context by AA pilot and famed author Ernest K. Gann, who said: “A Ford Tri-Motor clangs along at 105 decibels, a number which almost exactly matches its cruising speed.” 

Passengers warmed to the hot meals introduced on the DC-3. While this feature had been pioneered in Europe in the late 1920s, it was AA and the DC-3 that first offered Chicken Kiev and Long Island Duckling instead of cold boxed meals to US passengers.

Impact 

The impact of the DC-2 and DC-3 on the world’s economy was immense. In the US, passenger fatality rates plummeted from 1 per 11 million mi. in 1936 to 1 per 81 million mi. in 1940. In 1939 the “Scheduled Airlines of the United States” were awarded the Collier Trophy for flying 17 months without a single fatality.

Owing to the safety record of the DC-3 and its progenitor, insurers began offering flight insurance in 1937 for the first time. Passengers could buy $5,000 cover for 25 cents. In the same year, life insurance was offered to airline pilots and the practice of temporarily cancelling policies when passengers set foot on an aircraft was discontinued. Timemagazine commented: “That insurance companies can now bet $5,000 to two bits [25 cents] against a passenger being killed on a flight of some 800 miles is one of the best pieces of publicity which US airlines ever had.” American followed this up with a thought-provoking and effective advertisement featuring C.R. asking: “Why Dodge This Question: Afraid to Fly?”

US passenger numbers, meanwhile, leapt 265% from 572, 265 in 1934 to 2.09 million in 1939 and increased a further 54% in 1940 to 3.16 million. By 1938, DC-3s were carrying 95% of all commercial traffic in the US and by 1939, 90% of the world’s airline traffic. The amazing economics of the transport and the growth of traffic contributed to a 50% decline in airfares compared to when the DC-3 entered service.

Those new passengers also freed carriers from reliance on airmail contracts as their main source of revenue. In 1931 the fledgling US airline industry generated $24 million in revenue of which 82.5% was from mail and the balance from passengers. By 1940 the figures were almost reversed, with 70% of total industry revenue of $76 million coming from passengers and the rest from mail and express cargo.

“It was the first airplane that could make money just by hauling passengers,” Smith said. “With previous planes, if you multiplied the number of seats by the fares being charged you couldn’t break even with a 100% load. Economically, the DC-3 allowed us to expand and develop new routes where there was no mail pay.”

And that was really the key. The DC-3 gave airlines freedom to fly longer legs nonstop, which in itself reduced costs as well as making air travel much faster aside from the additional speed of the aircraft. The effect was similar to the impact of open skies and liberalization today.

Smith added another dimension when he told Douglas Ingells, author of “The Plane that Changed the World,” that the DC-3 was the agent for the standardization that accounted for much of the growth. “It was uneconomical and unsightly to have a system full of mismatched aircraft. What was needed was one attractive type capable of carrying a sizable load a good distance and at low costs. At the time we considered the DC-3 the perfect airplane.” By the middle of 1941, AA’s fleet consisted of 67 DC-3s with all other types retired. That model was picked up by Southwest Airlines in the 1970s and is typical of low-cost carriers today.

Another dimension to the DC-3’s success and affordability was mass production. Prior to World War II, Douglas Aircraft had ramped up production to six a month, bringing unheard-of economies of scale to building large aircraft and laying the groundwork for the “arsenal of democracy” to roll out fighters and bombers by the thousands during the war years.

Golden Age 

On May 30, 1935, Douglas delivered the 23rd Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture on the progress of commercial aircraft to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. He told the RAeS that aviation was in a “golden era” and listed a host of contributing factors for the emergence of airliners such as the Boeing 247, DC-2 and the yet-to-fly DC-3: “An alert and ambitious military technical personnel played its part in accelerating the brains of our designers. A growing competition among the airlines spurred the development of faster and safer airliners. A need on the part of the manufacturers for a broader market for their products and an ability, represented in favorable balance sheets, to seek this with newer and newer types, both military and civilian, added to activity in this field.”

And he gave credit to Lockheed for its “early attempts at really fast airplanes,” saying it pointed the way for others to see what might be done. “But beyond all this, and certainly marking the time as one of real accomplishment, has been the fact that all agencies concerned in and contributing to aviation have been most alert, cooperative and constructive.”

Douglas added: “Our engines have been developing at a pace to permit the airplane designer to raise his sights from time to time. Our instruments and radio people have aided tremendously by furnishing us with means to fly in bad weather. Propeller makers have been most helpful, and in fact I can say that the development of the variable pitch propeller to the point it has reached today is probably the most fundamentally important development of the period. Without it, many of our present airliners would be impractical.”

In a prophetic snapshot of the future of aviation, he said, “For the first time speed through the air was only one function to be solved in the solution of the equation of a successful ship. Speed of inspection and maintenance during fueling stops, and studies to cut the time required to make replacements, were given great consideration.” The DC-2’s engine installation was a revolution in its day, with plug-connecting fuel and electrical lines enabling an engine change in 2 hr.

Douglas also highlighted comfort as a major factor: “Comfort was studied with care and sound engineers developed efficient and practical methods of eliminating the formerly disagreeable and tiring noise of the air transport. Heating and ventilation comparable to that found in modern buildings was effected after the aid of related industries was obtained.”

Production 

By the end of 1941 a total of 507 DC-3s had been built, but with the US now fully engaged in WW II, orders for another 369 were transferred to the US military. Peak US production was in 1944 when 4,878 were built at plants at Long Beach, Santa Monica and Oklahoma City. Overall production hit a high of one aircraft every 34 min. In all, Douglas built 10,654 military models of the DC-3, the majority of them C-47s, while other contractors in Russia and Japan took that number to well over 13,000.

At the conclusion of the war, surplus military aircraft flooded the market and could be purchased for around $8,000 to $15,000, with some picked up for $1,200 in 1945 dollars. These surplus planes helped found many airlines, among them Cathay Pacific Airways, whose first aircraft, Betsy, was an Army surplus C-47.

But the age of the DC-3 was coming to an end. The war greatly accelerated technological advances like pressurization, and introduction of the first jet transport was only a decade away. Production of the DC-3/C-47 ceased in 1945, although Douglas rebuilt some surplus C-47s as DC-3Cs and delivered the last in March 1947, while the Super DC-3, a post-war higher-performance model, failed. Nevertheless, it is estimated that more than 300 are still flying and command prices of more than $100,000.

To this day, AA remains proud of its leading role in the development of the aircraft. Flagship Knoxville, a lovingly restored 1940 DC-3, is the centrepiece exhibit at the American Airlines C.R. Smith Museum in Dallas.