The Plane That Made Flying a Business

Douglas DC-3. Photo: San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives (public domain)

Did you know that in the early days of the airlines, passengers were almost a side hustle?

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, American airlines made their real money hauling mail for the government. The mail contract paid. The people in the back did not. Cabins were loud, cold and slow, and even a full airplane usually didn’t cover its own costs. Carrying people was something airlines did around the edges of the mail business.

Then Douglas built one airplane and the whole thing flipped.

It starts with a crash

A Fokker F-10 trimotor. Photo: SDASM Archives (public domain)

On March 31, 1931, a Transcontinental and Western Air Fokker F-10 broke up over the Kansas prairie near Bazaar. Moisture had worked its way into the wing structure and weakened the glue holding the wooden spar together. The spar let go, the wing came off, and everyone on board died. Eight people, including Knute Rockne, the Notre Dame football coach and probably the most famous man in American sport at the time.

That last part matters more than it should. Airliners had crashed before. This one killed a celebrity, and the country noticed. Wooden wings suddenly looked like what they were, which was a construction method borrowed from an era when airplanes didn’t carry the public for money.

TWA wanted something better. On August 2, 1932, Jack Frye, the airline’s vice president of operations, sent a letter to half a dozen manufacturers describing the airplane he wanted: all metal, three engines preferred, twelve passengers plus two pilots, a range of one thousand miles, and able to take off fully loaded on any two of its three engines. That letter gets treated as the birth certificate of the DC-1, and it deserves the title.

Douglas answered it, and then quietly ignored half of it. Instead of three engines they proposed two, because engines had gotten good enough that two would do the job. The DC-1 flew in 1933. Only one was ever built. TWA accepted it, then ordered the stretched production version, the DC-2, and by 1934 Douglas had a real airliner selling to real airlines.

Good airplane. Still not the one.

The phone call

C.R. Smith of American Airlines, 1935. Photo: Los Angeles Times (CC BY 4.0)

The DC-2 had a problem that looks small and wasn’t. It was too narrow for sleeping berths.

American Airlines was still flying Curtiss Condor biplanes on its overnight transcontinental routes, because the Condor was wide enough to put people to bed. Slow, fabric covered, obsolete, and the only thing American had that could do the job.

So C.R. Smith, American’s president, called Donald Douglas and asked him to build a wider one.

Douglas said no. He had a full order book, the DC-2 was selling, and he didn’t believe there was a market for a bigger version. Smith stayed on the phone. The call is usually described as running a couple of hours, with Smith arguing and Douglas refusing, until Douglas gave in mostly to get off the line. Smith then backed it with a firm order, which is the part that actually made it real.

Douglas handed the job to Arthur Raymond, his chief engineer. Raymond and his team spent about two years on it. The result was the Douglas Sleeper Transport, and it was not a stretched DC-2. It was wider, stronger, and had a new wing.

It flew for the first time on December 17, 1935, from Clover Field in Santa Monica, with Carl Cover at the controls. December 17 is the anniversary of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. Thirty-two years to the day. I’ve never seen Douglas admit that was deliberate, and I’ve never believed it was an accident either.

The number that changed everything

A DC-3 before the war. Photo: Anton F. Baumann (public domain)

The DST carried fourteen sleeping berths. The day version, the one everybody remembers as the DC-3, carried twenty-one seats.

Twenty-one seats doesn’t sound like a revolution. It was. The DC-2 carried fourteen. Half again as many people, on an airplane that burned about the same fuel, needed the same two pilots, and flew the same route in the same time. That’s where the money came from. Not from a breakthrough engine or some clever new shape, but from the fact that the fixed costs of a flight got spread across fifty percent more paying customers.

For the first time, an airline could fill an airplane with nothing but passengers and come out ahead. No mail contract. No subsidy. Just people who wanted to be somewhere else.

C.R. Smith, the man who talked Douglas into it, put it about as plainly as anyone could: it was the first airplane in the world that could make money just by hauling passengers.

On the channel: I cover aircraft programs like this one in more depth on YouTube — the rise-and-fall stories, and why the industry made the calls it made. EMaviation on YouTube

Then it took over the world

Building C-47s, 1942. Photo: Alfred T. Palmer / Library of Congress (public domain)

Airlines bought it because the math worked, and once enough of them had it the DC-3 stopped being a product and became the industry. By 1939 it was flying somewhere around ninety percent of the world’s airline traffic. One airplane type. That number will never happen again, and honestly it shouldn’t.

Then the war arrived and made the number look small. The military version, the C-47, was built in the thousands. Over ten thousand of them, against six hundred and seven civil DC-3s. Add the licensed Soviet production as the Lisunov Li-2 and the Japanese version built under a pre-war license, and the total goes past sixteen thousand.

An Air Transport Command C-47 over the pyramids. Photo: US Army Air Forces (public domain)

The C-47 carried supplies over the Himalayas, dropped paratroopers over Normandy, flew the Berlin Airlift, and ended up on skis in Antarctica. Eisenhower listed it among the handful of things that won the war. It’s a strange fate for an airplane that only exists because one airline executive wanted his passengers to be able to lie down.

Around one hundred fifty are still flying today, ninety years after that first flight. Not in museums — working, in places where the runway is dirt and the alternative is nothing.

R4Ds at Williams Field, Antarctica, around 1957. Photo: US Navy (public domain)

Why this is where the story starts

This is episode one of a series about McDonnell Douglas, and I picked the DC-3 deliberately, because you cannot understand the fall without seeing how high the starting point was.

I’ve written before about the plane that put Brazil in aviation, and that story is the mirror image of this one — a country with no aircraft industry building itself one around a single airplane. The DC-3 is what it looks like when a company already has everything and gets the airplane right anyway.

In 1939 Douglas didn’t just lead the airliner business. Douglas was the airliner business. Nine out of ten airline passengers in the world were sitting in something Douglas built. No manufacturer has ever had a position like that, before or since, and it’s hard to imagine anyone getting one again.

Sixty years later the company was gone, folded into Boeing, and the arguments people are still having about Boeing today trace straight back to that merger. The interesting question isn’t how Douglas failed. It’s how a company that dominant managed to lose at all.

That’s the next episode: how Douglas owned the piston era so completely that it let Boeing walk away with the jet age.

What are your thoughts on the DC-3 — is it still the most important airliner ever built, or has something since earned that spot?

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Sources

• 1931 Transcontinental & Western Air Fokker F-10 crash — Wikipedia
• Douglas DC-1 — Wikipedia
• Douglas DC-3 — Wikipedia
• Douglas DC-3 — National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian
• 17 December 1935 — This Day in Aviation
• First Flight of the Douglas DC-3 — Vintage Aviation News