Douglas DC-3
The Douglas DC-3 is a twin-engine airliner that first flew on December 17, 1935, and became the first airliner able to make money carrying passengers alone, without a mail subsidy. Adapted for war as the C-47 Skytrain, it served with air forces around the world, and decades after production ended examples are still at work carrying cargo.
Why It Mattered
In the mid-1930s, airlines in the United States still depended on government mail contracts, because no airliner carried enough passengers, fast enough, to pay its way on fares alone. The DC-3 was the first U.S. airliner that could turn a profit on passenger fares alone, with no mail subsidy behind it. Its speed, capacity and low operating costs made scheduled passenger service a business rather than a gamble. By 1939 the DC-3 accounted for 90 percent of world airline trade. It set the pattern for the modern airliner, and its military versions went on to serve around the world.
Design Notes
The DC-3 began as an enlarged DC-2 built to hold berths for overnight flights, after C. R. Smith, president of American Airlines, asked Douglas directly for a larger, more comfortable sleeper aircraft. The sleeper version, the Douglas Sleeper Transport, first flew on December 17, 1935; with 21 seats fitted in place of the 14 berths, it became the DC-3. The airframe was an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with a strong multiple-spar wing, cantilever construction, retractable landing gear and trailing-edge flaps. Two radial engines — Wright Cyclones or Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasps, depending on the version — gave it a top speed of about 230 mph. Pilots valued its stability, gentle handling and excellent single-engine performance, which contributed to a strong safety record.
Operational History
American Airlines opened Douglas Sleeper Transport service between New York and Chicago on June 25, 1936, and began DC-3 service that September. Other U.S. airlines followed, and by 1938 DC-3s were carrying 95 percent of all U.S. commercial airline traffic. The type also spread abroad: by 1939 it was carrying 90 percent of the world's airline traffic. A late-1938 transcontinental DC-3 flight took 18 hours 40 minutes including stops, where the same journey in 1934 had typically taken 25 hours, more than one airline and at least two changes of plane. War turned the airliner into a military transport: versions built for the U.S. armed forces were designated C-47 and C-53, and the type was known in British service as the Dakota. C-47s carried troops, cargo and wounded in the European and Pacific theaters; on D-Day they ferried paratroopers to France, and in 1948 they initiated the Berlin Airlift. Production was correspondingly large: 803 commercial transports and 10,123 military versions were built in the United States, with about 3,000 more built under license in Russia as the Li-2 and almost 500 in Japan.
Afterlife
After the war the type settled into a second career that has never quite ended: large numbers were still flying passengers and cargo into the 1990s. Turboprop conversions have extended its working life further; the Basler BT-67 rebuild fits PT6A turboprop engines and stretches the fuselage by 40 inches. How many remain active is an estimate that shrinks with time: one magazine account put at least 400 still flying in 2013, mainly on cargo runs, while about 230 appeared on the Canadian and U.S. civil registers in early 2021. The type is also widely preserved: the Smithsonian's DC-3 flew more than 56,700 hours for Eastern Air Lines before its last commercial flight on October 12, 1952, and remains on display.