Few aircraft have had a greater impact on the sector globally than the Douglas DC-3.
As more than a million passengers passed through Perth Airport enroute to holiday destinations last year, a 90-year anniversary quietly slipped by for the plane that made it all possible.
The aviation world changed forever on December 17 1935 with the first flight of the Douglas DC-3, an event that sucked the oxygen out of the market for every other type of commercial aircraft.
According to Donald Douglas Snr, when American Airlines president Cyrus Rowlett ‘CR’ Smith placed the order that would launch the DC-3, the aviation pioneer was left “in a cold sweat, because he just didn’t have the money to pay for them”.
That nervous beginning seems incongruous with what we know 90 years after the DC-3’s first flight, with the aircraft among few inventions in any endeavour that transformed their world at the time and remained relevant almost a century later.
Yet the DC-3 did just that: it reshaped commercial flight, global commerce and public confidence in aviation.
The birth of what is widely regarded as the greatest aircraft ever built was anything but predictable.
In a 1948 interview with Australia’s eminent aviation writer, Stanley Brogden, Douglas Snr recalled that the idea emerged when CR Smith and chief engineer Bill Littlewood were flying aboard one of the airline’s Curtiss Condors.
Smith wanted to combine the Condor’s cabin width with the technology and performance of the new DC-2; essentially a true transcontinental sleeper plane that would bury the competition.
Douglas resisted: “Why should I have liked it? I had plenty of DC-2s on order,” he recounted.
But Smith persisted, spending $US300 on a marathon phone call to sell his vision.
The offer: 20 sleeper-converted DC-2s. The eventual order became 10 Douglas Sleeper Transports (DSTs) and a batch of the new 21-passenger model.
Essentially, Douglas would widen the DC-2’s cabin from a 1-1 configuration to 2-1.
Lacking funds, Smith travelled to Washington to persuade Jesse Jones of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, returning with a $US4.5 million loan that would wake the world to modern air travel.
Even after the aircraft’s first flight, Douglas management still didn’t appreciate what they had on their hands.
No official photos were taken of the first flight.
Three years after the aircraft entered service (June 1936), 99 per cent of all US airline passengers were flying aboard DC-2s or DC-3s.
By December 1941, Douglas had delivered 507 DC-3s, 434 directly to airlines.
The improvements over the DC-2 were transformative.
American Airlines insisted on duplicated flight instruments for redundancy and improved night-flying illumination. Automatic undercarriage retraction and foot brakes modernised cockpit ergonomics.
The DC-3 also featured other pioneering advances, such as Jack Northrop’s multi-cellular wing, the aerodynamic expertise of W Bailey Oswald of Caltech, variable-pitch propellers, autopilot, powered brakes and wing flaps.
Its predecessor, the DC-2, had been so advanced that many doubted it was real.
When Sir Roy Fedden of Bristol Engines showed a DC-2 photo to UK officials in 1934, they dismissed it as a fake.
British newspapers mocked KLM’s entry of a DC-2 in the MacRobertson Air Race from London to Melbourne as “American propaganda”.
But the aircraft finished second, despite carrying passengers and flying a longer route with more stops, cementing Douglas’s global credibility.
Economically the DC-3 was nothing short of revolutionary.
In 1936, Douglas told his board that the DST’s (DC-3) payload exceeded previous airliners by a third, while operating costs were comparable to the Ford Tri-Motor despite carrying triple the payload.
Performance was equally astonishing.
In 1934, American’s transcontinental service took 38 hours and 30 minutes across three aircraft types and 13 stops.
The DC-3 slashed it to 17 hours 45 minutes and three stops.
Passengers were enamoured. The DC-3’s soundproofing set new standards.
A British trade journal wrote that flying on a DC-3 “would send even the most wide-awake European dictator (Hitler) into a pleasant slumber.”
Hollywood took notice, too. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Charlie Chaplin and Sam Goldwyn all travelled aboard American’s early DC-3s.
Thanks to the DC-3’s safety record, affordable flight insurance became a reality.
The DC-3 changed everything. US airline passenger numbers soared 265 per cent between 1935 and 1939 and a further 54 per cent in 1940.
Fatality rates plummeted, from one per 11 million miles to one per 81 million. US airlines even won the Collier Trophy for 17 consecutive fatality-free months.
As passengers flocked to flying, mail revenue became secondary. In 1931, airlines earned 82.5 per cent of revenue from mail. By 1940, 70 per cent came from passengers.
By 1938, the DC-3 carried 95 per cent of all US airline traffic, and by 1939 it shouldered 90 per cent of global airline traffic. Airfares dropped by 50 per cent.
American Airlines’ CR Smith was ecstatic, claiming the DC-3 was “the first airplane that could make money just by hauling passengers”.
It freed airlines from mail contracts, enabled standardised fleets, and set the model later perfected by Southwest Airlines.
By mid-1941, American Airlines’ entire fleet consisted of 67 DC-3s.
It was the prototype of the low-cost airline model that would emerge with Southwest Airlines in 1967 and started operations in 1971. One type only.
In Australia, meanwhile, the success of the DC-2 in the MacRobertson air race prompted the government to lift its ban on the importation of American aircraft in November 1935.
The first Australian DC-2 arrived in Melbourne in April 1936 and began regular passenger service on May 5 1936 on the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne route.
The first of the wider DC-3s to arrive in Australia came in November 1937 for Airlines of Australia, with more quickly following for Australian National Airways.
By the end of 1941, Douglas had built 507 DC-3s, with 369 more transferred to the US military as war loomed. Peak production came in 1944, when a DC-3 (or C-47) rolled off a US production line every 34 minutes.
Surplus C-47s flooded the market after WWII, selling for as little as $US1,200 ($2,000). They became the backbone of post-war global airline expansion.
Douglas ultimately built 10,125 military models, with licensed production in Japan and Russia and assembly in the Netherlands.
Many remained in mainline service into the 1960s, and in regional work well beyond.
Perth-based MacRobertson Miller Airlines’ (MMA) inaugural DC-3 service departed Maylands Aerodrome on November 28 1945 at the company’s traditional 6am early start for Geraldton, Carnarvon, Onslow, Port Hedland, Broome to Derby.
It was crewed by Jimmy Woods and Alex Whitham, and MMA’s first air hostess Anne Shooter, who had been employed the previous week for the new DC-3.
With the first DC-3 in service, MMA moved its passenger, freight and postal services from Maylands to the new Perth Airport.
In all, MMA operated 12 DC-3s with the last scheduled passenger service on August 29 1970, from Port Hedland to Perth, although DC-3s continued to operate as freighter aircraft well into the 1970s.
Today, there are six DC-3s still operating in Australia, usually for air displays and charters.
When Douglas accepted the Collier Trophy from President Roosevelt in 1936 for the twin-engine transport, he said: “There is nothing revolutionary in the airplane business. It is a matter of development.”
In the case of the DC-3, that “development” produced an aircraft so perfect, so capable, and so adaptable that it remains, 90 years later, the machine that taught the world to fly.
There is a piece of the DC-3 in every commercial aircraft that operates today.
