Today, we ride the first modern passenger airplane.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Lost Horizon
was one of my first movies. Do you remember Ronald
Colman stumbling out of an airplane, crash-landed
high in the Himalayas, into the mythical city of
Shangri-La? I'll never forget it. The year was
1937, and the plane was one of the revolutionary
new Douglas models that quite altered air transport
in the mid-thirties and that are still being used
today -- 50 years later.
The story of the Douglas DC-3 begins with the death
of the great football player Knute Rockne in the
crash of a Fokker Trimotor in 1931. His death
caused a public outcry over the quality of American
air passenger service. The leading airliners were
then the Fokker Trimotor and its American clone,
the Ford Trimotor -- great machines in their day --
made of plywood with a fabric and corrugated-steel
covering.
TWA -- then called Western Airlines -- responded by
contracting with the Douglas company to build an
airplane that could take off fully loaded on just
one of its two engines and beat a Ford Trimotor
from Santa Monica to Albuquerque. Douglas did just
that in 1933 with the experimental DC-1. Then they
went into production with the 14-passenger DC-2
version and started service with TWA in 1934.
The DC-2 was a great success, but it was clear that
the airplane would have to carry more than 14
people. They contracted with Douglas, whose chief
engineer, Bill Littlewood, wrote the specifications
for a third and permanent model of this remarkable
new plane. The result was the 21-passenger DC-3,
which entered service in 1936. By 1941, 80 percent
of commercial airplanes in the United States were
DC-3s, and they were still the most widely used
airliner in 1948.
What the DC-3 did was to combine all-metal
stressed-skin construction, variable-pitch
propellers, and retractable landing gear into a
two-engine, low-wing monoplane that was safe,
reliable, and easily maintained. It brought us from
the airplane design of the twenties to that of the
forties in one step.
Still, these new features weren't unique to the
DC-2 and 3. A whole set of flying boats that had
most of them also came into being in 1934 -- bigger
and with greater range. It isn't clear whether or
not they followed Douglas's lead. But it's very
clear that the DC-3 is still flying today, and they
are not.
1934 has been called the miraculous year of
American flight. What really happened was that a
lot of good ideas emerged all at once. The DC-3 was
the almost perfect combination of these ideas. It
was the airplane to take us to Shangri-La.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
