Thread: Gooney Bird

The Biscuit Bomber was a local term originating in the New Guinea campaign during WW2. Air resupply was something new and thought to be impractical and unneeded by Blamey and MacArthur. The first few drops that were done, no parachute was involved. They flew in low and shoved the boxes out. most being smashed or lost in the jungle. Very poor logistics

Danny

I watched a DVD on the DC3 last week. It was interesting watching the Biscuit Bomber drops in PNG They were remarkably accurate in the video.

Originally Posted by olbod

Me and a mate ran away from home in 1951, we went to Brisbane.
After a few days we were running out of money so we flew back to Sydney in a DC3. My first experience flying. Loved it, from then on I was hooked.

When Elisabeth came to visit me in Ceduna in 1970, she flew from Adelaide in a DC3. She said there were a number of air sick people on board. She like the flight and all the take-offs and landings at intermediate dirt strips.

Originally Posted by p38arover

When Elisabeth came to visit me in Ceduna in 1970, she flew from Adelaide in a DC3. She said there were a number of air sick people on board. She like the flight and all the take-offs and landings at intermediate dirt strips.

Yep, I think they are one of the best aircraft ever built.

I would love to afford to own one.

I knew the DC3s in RAAF Butterworth as Gooneys in 1967, they were part of the VIP fleet.
There is a book called something like 'DC3 a wonderful aeroplane' or similar that I read years ago telling some of its exploits and adventures. (Googled it but nothing came up)

One story I can tell involved a flight with a couple of local 'dignitaries' where the pilot came back aft to get a coffee from the urn with another of the flight crew.
They were then joined by another officer from the cockpit who walked down the aisle feeding out two lengths of string as he walked.
He then passed the ends of the two pieces of string to one of the 'guests' to 'just hold these and keep it steady for me will you please?'
The poor chap must have been a complete technophope, he held those strings like his life depended on them in total fear.
Yes there were some repercussions for causing embarrassment to a 'dignitary', but every one else thought it a great joke.
cheers

A saw a classic on the back page of Australian Aviation some years back. When the RAAF were still using the Dakota's it used to be funny for other pilots who were riding in the back to have some fun with the pilots up front flying the plane. The pilots who were passengers would all get up and go to the back of the aircraft prior to takeoff and stay there until pilots up front trimmed it to fly level when they got a bit higher up. Unbenownst to them the pilots in the back would then run to the front after it was trimmed for "level" flight upsetting the attitude of the aircraft. This would be done several times making the DC-3 porpoise up and down and annoy the guys up front.

One time the pilots up front got their own back. The senior pilot tied a bolt to a bit of string and fed it out the window so it made a racket as it was banging on the aluminium skin outside the aircraft. He then shut down the engine on that side. After about 15 minutes of letting the pilots in the back stew with one engine shut down, they fed the string out the window on the other side......

As a youth I flew back and forth Brisbane-Winton a few times in DC3's Locally known as the tin crow. I forget how many stops on the way but the trip was something like 9-10 hours. Better than two days on the steam train, or two days on the goat tracks in a car. No bitumen after Dalby then. The safety Nazis of today would have fits. Cargo loaded in the aisle, like crates of milk, insulated bags of ice cream, once even a truck diff housing, mail bags under seats etc.

One of the reasons for the longevity of the DC3 is that owing to shortcomings in the design process, and a fortuitous choice of the alloy used for the structure, the airframe is far stronger than required, and is almost totally proof against fatigue.

DC-3s have flown successfully with much more powerful engines and have been grossly overloaded by accident, and got away with it.

It was an enlarged version of the earlier DC-2 (which came second in the 1934 MacRobertson Melbourne Centenary Air Race from London, behind a specially designed DH88 Comet racer). During the evacuation of parts of China ahead of the Japanese a so-called DC 2 1/2, a DC3, with the shorter outer panel of a DC2 replacing one damaged by bombing, succeeded in flying about 40 passengers to Burma.

I seem to remember that in the early seventies, a DC-3 being used for crop dusting in NZ made a successful landing after losing most of one wing outboard of the engine in a midair collision.

John