Thread: How long?

Not mentioned in this clip, and apparently not widely known, is that purely by chance, the specific aluminium alloy used is almost immune to fatigue. At the time the airframe was designed, airframe fatigue was not well understood, and in fact the accident that first led to the serious study of it was still some years in the future (in Australia between Adelaide and Melbourne if my memory is correct).

The reason that the DC-3 was designed for short, unimproved runways, is simply that there was nothing else at the time (long, paved runways are a product of military requirements in WW2, and by 1945 were plentiful almost everywhere, because it was a world war). But what made it possible for the aircraft to continue for ninety years is this immunity to fatigue. And this longevity meant was that there was no market for a replacement. I remember that as late as 1971 more than half the world's airline flights were in DC-3s. The factor that led to a rapid drop in DC3 use where it could be replaced (mainly by the F27) in the 1970s was that the US Army made extensive use of the DC-3 in the Vietnam war, and substantially depleted the world stocks of spares, especially engine spares - up to that time the world fleet of DC-3s had been kept flying by the large stock of spares that had been sold, often at scrap prices, shortly after the end of hostilities in WW2.

I recall reading about an airline (Australian charter?) operating in South East Asia, during the 1949 Chinese revolution. The company had a base, workshop and spare parts in China and decided it would be prudent to relocate all unattached assets out of China. A DC3 being repaired was hurriedly reassembled and flown out. In the rush, a wing from a different variant was fitted.
The plane, from that point on obviously pulled to one side. The fix was to hang a bag of sand from the yoke. The aircraft was operated in this fashion for a number of years, before anyone noticed the wing sizes differed.

Unless there are two examples of this happening, I suspect it has grown in the telling,

The story as I know it from my book on the DC-3, without going and finding it, is that CNAC operating in China was evacuating in the face of the Japanese advance. One of their DC-3s had a wing damaged in an attack on the airfield. There was no spare for the DC-3, but they did have a spare for the wing of a DC-2, so they fitted it, and it worked.

The best account I could find quickly is by one of those involved. CNAC's Famous DC-2 1/2

Your version is probably more accurate, John. Mine is from an ever failing memory of a library book (more than probably the same book as yours), I read over thirty years ago.

Talking of failing memories, if mine is working correctly, about fifty years ago, a DC-3 in NZ, being used for crop dusting, suffered a mid air collision, and lost most of an outboard wing. It proceeded to make a landing without further damage after dumping its load.

Over the years, I have travelled quite a bit in DC-3s, mostly in Qld and PNG, and including a charter flight from a claypan in the Simpson to Brisbane. In the 1960s I was living in Roma in Queensland, and we were very unhappy when the DC-3 service was replaced by Twin Otters. With the DC-3 there was never a problem with any of our emergency airfreght parts some of which were quite heavy. With the replacement anything of any weight had to come by road, and the roads were nowhere near as good as today, and neither was the freight service - the state government was still trying to keep freight on rail. Which was not much good if you wanted it this week!

Yes an enduring workhorse. The local airport inTassie, Wynyard, was serviced by these flying machines. T.A.A. and Ansett, both on the Melbourne route and both landing within minutes of each other, which really was stupidity.

Anyhow my first time in an aircraft was about 1963 on a football trip to Australia and of course ,in the rattling, vibrating, noisey, DC 3
I think I enjoyed it.

In.
Vietnam we called them Biscuit Bombers, dunno why, and they also did a lot of low level spraying.

Dave

I recall as a chiĺd, when flying was not as prolific as today, a guide at Fleay's Wildlife Sanctuary, interupting his own monologue, to point out the native aircraft, who only in Australia always flew in pairs, 90 seconds apart.

Originally Posted by Hogarthde

......

In.
Vietnam we called them Biscuit Bombers, dunno why, and they also did a lot of low level spraying.

Dave

I think I can shed light on this. My brother in law was a warrant officer in Papua New Guinea in WW2. On at least one occasion his unit was cut of from surface supplies for a number of weeks, and were supplied with food and other essentials by DC-3s which dropped the supplies from low level, without the help of parachutes. Since a large proportion of the food supplies were "ships biscuits" the flights became known as "Biscuit Bombers".

On one occasion during the wet in N Qld in 1963 I experienced a similar event (only it was a Cessna not a DC3). With our camp cut off by road for nearly six weeks, we got essential food supplies flown in. There was a perfectly good airstrip, but the pilot thought it looked too wet (it was on a small island) so he flew to Hughenden, I think it was, removed a door, and got a local policeman to help chuck the supplies out. Unlike the biscuit bombers they were not packed for dropping. They dropped the stuff into shallow water near the nearby homestead. Most of the packages burst on impact. However, we salvaged most of the meat floating in the water, and it just needed to have the grit washed off it, the bread was OK after being dried in the oven, the large bags of flour did not burst and the water only spoiled a couple of millimetres. But you have to wonder about the mentality of someone who thought it was a good idea to chuck a cardboard carton with 12 dozen eggs in it out of a plane. Surprisingly we managed to recover nearly half the eggs floating individually in the waist deep water. Someone recognised the bag from Elders as it left the plane, and caught it on the full - that was the tobacco and cigarettes! Vegetables etc mostly survived OK.