Here’s a DC-7 / DC-3 story.
In 1959 we all went to Honolulu from San Francisco (3 year old me, mom and dad).
Moms college roomate married a guy who was in whatever the Navy called ROTC.
He eventually became a boomer commander, which is another series of good stories.
We used to visit them summers at wherever they were and that year they were at Pearl.
So we fly out economy standby, pass kids as you know. United had a first class flight on a 377 that left SFO at 9 am and a coach flight in a DC-7 that left at 11 am and landed right behind the stratobruiser.
After a week on Oahu we three went down to the Big Island on an inter island carrier.
DC-3 with sideways benches. Bet I got you there silk boy.
The only other passengers were a chain gang of native Hawaiians returning from road work on Oahu. Dad being dad made friends with them, so a couple of days later we went up to the pen. Their industry was making platters and those really huge spoon fork sets our of very beautiful koa wood. He got a case of it sent home as extra cargo on a freight flight.
Of course I remember it all!
Hi :
When I was a tad ( oooh ,that was a long time ago ) I lived right next to the end of the runway area of what is now Buffalo N.Y. International Airport . I got to see many of the planes I would eventually ride in .Constellations , DC7-Cs and DC-6-B models and Lots of Capitol and United DC-3s for short hops . I remember when the first Capitol Airlines Vickers Viscount landed there .Boy What a fuss that caused in the neighborhood .It sounded like a funny jet back then .
When I went to Grandma’s house in NIAGARA FALLS they lived right next door to Bell Aircraft’s helo Plant .Remember those little Helo’s from Mash ? There were hundreds of them ( well , maybe not that many , but I was a kid, remember ) Parked all over the place .Grandpa got me a ride in one ! I have never forgotten taking off straight up with No Door ! Scary Yes ! Great , You Bet !
Yep United bought those Viscounts along with the airline.
I feel old.
My mother remembered the first DC-3 that flew into the teeming metropolitan airport at Lima, Ohio. When I was in grade school (and getting interested in model building), the sound of a propeller-driven airplane would be heard several times a day over our house in Columbus. If it was a Constellation or a DC-7, or a Flying Boxcar from Lockbourne AFB, I’d stop what I was doing and watch it till it was out of sight. If it was a DC-3, I wouldn’t bother. (Borrrring!)
I took my very first flight in a TWA Constellation. (Dad bought us a round-trip ticket to Dayton, so we could go to the Air Force Museum - still one of my favorite places in the country.) I remember when the first jet airliner, a Convair 880, landed at Columbus. (Hundreds of cars line the road to the airport to watch it fly overhead; when it finally did, there was a mass honking of horns. Dad and I got to look in the cockpit for a few seconds.)
I remember watching a PBS show about the DC-3, the big point of which show was that hundreds of them were still flying, because maintenance was so cheap that they could spend most of their time on the ground and still make money for the owners. That show must have been at least 20 years ago.
Just a few years back, as I was passing the little airport here in Greenville, NC, I heard loud, twin-engine sound over my head, and there was a DC-3 coming in for a landing. I made a u-turn and drove into the airport in time to see it park. It was an ex-military version, with the fancy double passenger/cargo door and a round piece of metal covering the hole for the astrodome.
Now DC-3s are considered museum pieces. There’s a beautiful C-47 hanging from the ceiling of the U.S. Army Airborne and Special Forces Museum in Fayetteville, and the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer has a Continental Airlines DC-3 under restoration.
I feel old…
Those Viscounts were nice aircraft. We flew one from Miami to Norfolk, probably in about 1965. My primary memory of the thing was the round door.
United had the first domestic short range jet, the Sud Caravelle. Dad was a procurement engineer on that, before Concorde. We lived in Toulouse a couple of summers. I think United bought 48 of them.
Yeah;
The Viscounts were nice .We had a neighbor who was a PILOT and he said that the pilots he knew called them " Turbo - Plops " cause if you didn’t do it just right they would end up either on or in the ground .That included that short lived American made plane .
That short lived American plane served the Navy quite well. My own particular childhood spotting targets were the P3s out of Moffett NAS in Mountain View CA.
Those guys were in and out all day. It’s a pity that there was only one kit of it available, a not very good box scale Revell.
But Electras and Viscounts aren’t exactly easy to come by.
Caravelle? Fuggetaboutit
My stepson, during his brief Navy career, trained to be an Aviation Ordnanceman on p-3 Orions. That got me sort of interested in the airplane. I know of two Orion kits other than the ancient Revell one: the big 1/72 Hasegawa monster and a very nice 1/144 one originally made by LS and later issued by Otaki. Minicraft also makes(or made) an Electra in 1/144. I don’t know how hard it would be to find any of those kits.