A FLYING LEGEND

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In July 1936, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded Donald W. Douglas the Collier Trophy—aviation’s highest honor—for the design and development of the DC-2, forerunner of the legendary DC-3. The President said, “The airplane, by reason of its high speed, economy, and quiet passenger comfort has been generally adopted by transport lines throughout the United States. Its merit has been further recognized by its adoption abroad, and its influence on foreign design is already apparent.”

“Probably the most memorable thing about the Dakota was the smell. The odour of the leather mixed with hydraulic fluid made a perfume second to none. The plane always treated me well, unlike some of the other birds I’ve flown, and my memories of it are all good.”

– Tex Gehman, Winnipeg, Canada

Like the Spitfire, Mustang, and a small number of other classic aircraft, the DC-3 / Dakota is a breed apart, distinguished not only by her lovely shape and exceptional design, engineering, durability and performance, as well as other fine qualities and characteristics, but by her enormous base of admirers. From the millions of people who have been her passengers, to the enthusiastic captains and crews who have operated her for more than eighty years, to her countless fans in the aviation world, and those whose lives have been affected by her in the most dramatic ways, she is truly unforgettable.

“We hauled GIs and admirals, ammunition, parts for tanks and submarines, medical equipment, engines, machine-guns, fighter pilots, prisoners-of-war and Indian troopers, jerked beef, land mines, tires, beer, entire P-40s with their wings slung below the fuselage and everything else inside, gold bars and jeeps, and tractors, statesmen, war correspondents, USO entertainers, horses, mysterious men in civilian attire who did not say who they were, wounded infantrymen and plasma and a lot of other things, usual and odd, that have a part in the waging of desert war. If it could be torn down into pieces that fit through a C-47’s cargo doors and didn’t bring the gross weight to more than 27,500 pounds, we hauled it. If it ran the weight up an extra 1,000 or so pounds, we falsified the load sheets and went anyway.”

– A World War Two C-47 pilot

During the mid-1930s, three airlines—TWA, United Airlines, and American Airlines—offered trans-continental passenger service in the United States. Of the three, only American provided sleeper service initially. The aircraft it operated on the route was the slow but relatively comfortable Curtiss Condor II biplane, but by 1935 it was clear to Cyrus Smith, president of American, that since the introduction of the greatly superior Douglas DC-2 into airline service, the days of his Condor were numbered. Smith needed help fast and, like TWA’s Jack Frye before him, he contacted Donald Douglas. Unlike Frye who had written a letter, Smith telephoned Douglas and in a two-hour, $300 call, managed to persuade the California plane maker to modify ten DC-2s for American to operate as “sleepers.” Initially, Douglas was not enthusiastic about Smith’s request for a new airliner that would be larger and more comfortable than the Condor and better than both the Boeing 247 and the DC-2. Production of the DC-2 was in full stride with more than 100 of the planes delivered and a further ninety on the order books. The massive work involved in design, re-tooling, and manufacturing a new model for Smith seemed to Donald Douglas a headache he didn’t need, and Douglas was unconvinced by Smith’s business commitment to night flying and the sleeper service. But Smith persisted and by the end of the conversation he had obtained agreement from Douglas to modify the ten DC-2s that American had already ordered.

It is believed that the actual idea for modifying the DC-2 to a sleeper had come about in a conversation between C.R. Smith and his chief engineer, William Littlewood, as the two were boarding a flight from Dallas to Los Angeles in the summer of 1934. Smith is supposed to have said, “Bill, what we need is a DC-2 sleeper plane!” When he returned to American’s Chicago headquarters, Littlewood involved his assistant, Otto Kirchner, in the development of detailed ideas for what would range well beyond mere minor changes in the DC-2. They included more powerful Wright Cyclone engines to cope with the increased gross weight of the new plane, and a wider fuselage to accommodate either fourteen sleeping berths or twenty-one seats for day-passengers, as well as an appropriate aisle. They estimated an 85 percent parts commonality with the DC-2 for their new stretched sleeper.

As the Douglas engineers got down to designing the sleeper for American, it became obvious that they were faced with a brand new aeroplane, not a minor modification of their highly successful DC-2. At a time when they struggled to keep pace with the world-wide demand for DC-2, they had little capacity for the sleeper project. Fortunately, many of the design calculations had already been made by engineers of American Airlines. Even so, with no airline other than American showing any interest in sleeper planes, Donald Douglas was reluctant to devote much of the company’s facilities to a small order for a very specialized model. What did inspire him to cooperate with C.R. Smith was the possibility (if only a remote one) of a new and far wider market for the basic aeroplane that would result from the redesign for American. With a fuselage two and a half feet longer and twenty-six inches wider, and a proper aisle, the new model would accommodate twenty-one day passengers and might attract the interest of other airlines. What may have clinched the deal for Douglas was Smith’s assurance that he could get $4,500,000 in loan funding from the government to finance the purchase of up to twenty of the new models, the first ten of which would be sleepers. Smith agreed to pay $79,500 each for the new planes (minus the engines and other items that the airline would provide). This was all agreed in that late-1934 phone call to Douglas and, in December 1935, the first Douglas Sleeper Transport or DST was rolled out of the Santa Monica factory. The day-passenger version would be designated DC-3.

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Nearly twenty years after the DC-3 first flew, Douglas introduced Smith as the featured speaker at a dinner. “This is an ideal time to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to my good friend C.R. Smith for his part in the development of the DC-3. He had tremendous faith in us, and in the future of air travel. His boundless energy, clear vision, and uncanny knack in making the right decision at the right time were the catalytic agents that greatly influenced us in taking steps to build that famous airplane.”

As design work on the DST progressed, it was clear to the Douglas engineers and to Donald Douglas that the original estimate of an 85 percent parts commonality had been wildly inaccurate. Both Littlewood and Smith, having done some research of their own while flying in DC-2s, had had a number of concerns about that aircraft. These added substantially to the design requirement while significantly reducing the parts commonality of the DST and DC-2. They included insufficient power, heavy aileron and rudder control, reported directional instability, excessive yawing in turbulence, and propeller and fin icing problems. All of these deficiencies led Littlewood to press for what amounted to a virtually new design. To a great extent, it was the friendly, cooperative working relationship between Bill Littlewood, Otto Kirchner, and Arthur Raymond of Douglas that allowed the critical six-month design phase of the DST programme to be accomplished with a minimum of friction.

The work on the DST at Santa Monica was also advanced through the assistance of American Airlines which provided one of their Curtiss Condor airliners for the Douglas engineers to evaluate in planning improved sleeping berths. Littlewood and Douglas’s Harry Wetzel devoted many hours to the task. A highly-detailed mock-up was built to help in identifying and resolving potential problems, such as passenger claustrophobia in the upper berths (dealt with through the installation of small additional windows). Raymond said, “. . . we spent more than half our time in the shop [on the DST project] and we had over 400 engineers and draftsmen working on the design. We spent many long nights producing more than 3,500 drawings, but it was worth it.” Thus did the approach and perspective of the Douglas team evolve over the course of their work on the DST/DC-3.

Raymond: “The DC-3 was almost a new airplane as far as actual parts, but it was two-thirds finished before we started because we were so far ahead (in design and development) with work on the DC-2.” The rollout of the first Douglas American Skysleeper took place on December 14, 1935—the emergence of an aeroplane quite different from its DC-2 forebear. The DST was longer, wider, had a larger tail fin, a wider wingspan, beefed-up landing gear, and more powerful engines. In terms of spare parts commonality with the DC-2, only about 10 per-cent were interchangeable.

With the introduction of the DST and the DC-3 that followed it, air travellers would experience an entirely new level of comfort, convenience, and safety on their journeys. To distinguish the interior from those of earlier and existing airliners, Douglas deliberately avoided the use of certain greens and other colors believed to affect passengers negatively with balance and airsickness problems. The interiors were done in light, airy colors to appear more spacious; the carpeting was dark to give a feeling of security. Again, Dr. Stephen Zand was given the challenge of soundproofing the passenger cabin and managed to insulate it to a sound level of only fifty-five decibels, similar to that of a railway carriage of the time. Air conditioning and heating systems were based on the lessons learned in the development of the DC-2, as were other systems pioneered on the DC-1 and DC-2. The landing gear, for example, was stronger than that of its predecessors, with better shock absorbers and engine-driven hydraulic oil pumps that raised and lowered the gear in seven seconds, as opposed to the sixty or more seconds required by the hand-pump system of the DC-2.

The stable, comfortable ride and easy control of the DST/DC-3 did not happen through luck or good fortune. The airframe was larger and different in many important respects from that of the DC-2. Ozzy Oswald said, “We tried dozens of models in the wind tunnel before we hit on the secret. We narrowed the airfoil, which changed the centre of balance of the airplane. The final wing design was enormously strong.” Additionally, the Douglas engineers reinforced the wing top skin with span-wise corrugated sheeting, making the wing stronger and better able to withstand compression. The wings also had a certain amount of built-in flexibility, allowing them to “flap” up to five degrees in flight, a slightly disconcerting characteristic when first observed by some passengers. They were reassured by the captain or a flight crew member that the phenomenon was normal. This was, after all, the first important commercial airliner constructed without struts or wires on the wings—a novelty for most travellers. Another innovation was the wing-mounted leading-edge lights used instead of the nose-mounted lights of the DC-2. The repositioning brought improved visibility for the pilots in poor weather conditions.

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Among the more impressive advances employed in the DST/DC-3 was the latest version of automatic variable propeller pitch which eased all aspects of engine performance, from take-off, through climb-out, cruise, descent, and landing. This, in combination with new, hydraulically operated trailing edge wing flaps, greatly improved both the lift of the wing on take-off and the ability to bleed off airspeed on the landing approach for a slower, safer, more comfortable landing.

Historians disagree about why Donald Douglas, most of his personnel, and the media seemed to take little interest in the first flight of the DST/DC-3. The take-off started the career of what may be the most important aircraft ever built, and was among the most significant events of the twentieth century. Yet, only a handful of engineers and draftsmen turned out on that sunny afternoon of December 17, 1935 to watch the shiny new airliner turn onto the Clover Field runway and begin its take-off roll. Carl Cover was again at the controls, but there would be no repeat of the near-disaster that had occurred on the maiden flight of the DC-1 in July 1933. In fact, years later, the principals of the company recalled that the day and the event itself were so routine that none of the Douglas executives took time out to witness it. Carl Cover: “I remember nothing beyond that it took place on that day. It was unremarkable—just another routine flight, similar to hundreds of others.” Frank Collbohm said, “I don’t even remember whether it happened in the morning or afternoon. I can’t separate it in my mind from any of the other test flights we made in those days. Obviously, everything was fine. There was nothing special; it was just another airplane going up.” And Arthur Raymond recalled, “When the airplane was ready, Carl and the others simply got aboard and took off. Of course, none of us had any idea it marked the start of an era.” Perhaps the most historically staggering realization about the event is that, as far as is known, it was not even photographed. Research has failed to turn up a single photo of the flight. The event passed practically unrecorded.

Decades after that first flight of the DST/DC-3, Arthur Raymond said that he had been asked again and again if he and the others in charge at Douglas had had any idea that the aeroplane would last fifty years. “Of course we didn’t! Our biggest decision was the question of whether to design the fuselage tooling for twenty-five airplanes or fifty. We took a deep breath and we said let’s go for fifty. Off that tooling we built 300. We made another set of tooling, three plants, and the rest is history. We didn’t have any idea what was evolving. Looking back, we were right to be conservative. We didn’t know we were building a legend.”

Executives of other airlines, who had previously yawned when the subject of sleeper service came up, were suddenly alert, interested and demanding a piece of that particular action. The advantage that American Airlines had secured with its order for the first lot of DSTs found them suddenly clamouring for their own sleeper planes and rushing to place orders with Douglas. They all watched jealously as American launched its inaugural Flagship service with the new planes, from Newark to Chicago on June 26, 1936. The DST made the flight in just three hours and fifty-five minutes, against eighteen hours by train. On September 18th, American began the first coast-to-coast Flagship sleeper service and, in that same month, began taking delivery of the first DC-3 day-passenger planes from the Santa Monica plant. A few months later, American started its DC-3 Mercury Service, flying from New York to California in fifteen hours—impressive to travellers who had been enduring a thirty-three hour trip in the Ford and Fokker Tri-Motor planes that made twenty-five or more stops en route and required some night-time travel by train.

The adventure for the early passengers aboard the American DST included hot meals served in-flight by a stewardess. Gone were sandwich-and-an-apple box lunches, to be replaced by service on china with quality silverware. Breakfasts offered pancakes or omelettes; lunches were often soup, fried chicken and vegetables with ice cream for dessert, and dinners included steaks, Long Island duckling, or Chicken Kiev, with salad and dessert. For twenty-one passengers, the meal service normally took about an hour.

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A Carroll altitude correction computer;

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An American Airlines Ertl 1939 Dodge Airflow flight service truck model;

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Tin-plate DC-3 models.

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Christmas Eve, 1946—the crash site of Western Airlines flight 44, a DC-3 en route from Holtville, California to San Diego in poor weather conditions.

With an eye towards the business executive who wanted and was willing to pay for a higher level of comfort and pampering on routes such as New York-Chicago, United Airlines offered “Club” service on its DC-3 Sky Lounge Mainliners, specially fitted with only fourteen seats—overstuffed lounge chairs that could be rotated at the press of a button to face a window or across the aisle or towards the rear of the plane. By June 1, 1937, American, United, and TWA were all offering a transcontinental DST sleeper service.

Up in the cockpit, flying and working conditions for the pilots were also greatly improved over those in the previous generation of airliners. A perfect operating environment had still to be achieved, however. The windshield of the DST/DC-3, for example, leaked in a storm, causing some captains and co-pilots to wear rubber aprons. Years later, with the advent of common silicone sealants, the problem was finally resolved.

With the arrival in the airline industry of the DC-3, it was clear at Douglas that the formerly bulging order book for the DC-2 would soon have to make way for burgeoning DC-3 production. Ironically, in their planning and calculations for the DST, Bill Littlewood and Otto Kirchner had laid much of the foundation for the coming DC-3 and had accelerated the end of production for the DST. They used the new Wright 1,000 hp Cyclone engines on the sleeper and, with the additional power, believed they could increase the lifting capacity of the plane and improve its profitability. In juggling the seating and baggage arrangement, they were able to seat twenty-one passengers for a 50 percent payload increase over that of the DC-2; this with only a 3 percent operating cost increase. The economic balance now tipped heavily in favor of the DC-3 day-plane version over the DST. The new, more powerful engines easily coped with the passenger and baggage weight increase and the DST’s fate was sealed. Airline customers could order even more powerful twin-row fourteen cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engines, each of which generated up to 1,200 hp. Only forty of the sleeper planes would ever be built, as the airlines quickly moved to take full advantage of the greater earning potential in the DC-3. The new airliner came with many other advantages as well. Its style of construction made it easy to maintain and repair. The wings and vertical fin could be fitted with de-icer boots housing flexible tubes which, when inflated with compressed air, expanded and cracked accumulated ice from the leading-edge surfaces.

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The DST came with two lavatories, one for men and one for women, both located at the rear of the cabin. The buffet area was at the front of the cabin, while on the DC-3 both galley and the single lavatory were located at the rear. Passenger seat positions were fitted with individual adjustable cool air ducts, a reading light and a cabin attendant call switch. Of all the features provided on the DST / DC-3, only one was almost universally unpopular with passengers—the steam-generated cabin heating system. Early travellers complained that it kept the cabin too hot or too cold, that it leaked and that it frequently malfunctioned. In time, Douglas solved the problem by fitting a “muff” around the engine exhausts that heated ram air ducted into the cabin.

Ample, well-located access panels in the fuselage and wings simplified the work of airline mechanics, and such routine jobs as changing an engine could now be accomplished by three mechanics in only two hours, reducing costly maintenance delays and keeping the planes flying and earning for more hours of the day and night. The DC-3 was normally equipped with ample overhead storage for carry-on or hand luggage. Mail and baggage were stowed in a forward compartment located just behind the cockpit and loaded through the small door on the left side of the nose. A rear baggage compartment aft of the lavatory was loaded through another left-side door. Schedule efficiency, performance and safety were improving as well, and the unit cost to the airlines was still attractive, especially when purchased in quantity at a significant discount. The original list price for a DST or DC-3 was between $90,000 and $110,000 in 1936, topping at around $115,000 by 1939—all dependent on equipment ordered by the customer, the amount of training requested by customer flight and maintenance personnel and after-delivery factory support. It was the powerful economic advantage afforded to those airlines equipped with the DC-3, that guaranteed its success for them and for Douglas. American’s C.R. Smith said, “The DC-3 freed the airlines from complete dependence upon government mail pay. It was an airplane that could make money by just handling passengers. With previous planes, if you multiplied the number of seats by the fares you couldn’t break even, not even with 100 percent load.” The chief engineer for the C-53 (one of the military versions of the DC-3), Malcolm Oleson said, “It [the DC-3] introduced higher speed, and greater comfort. It was very reliable. The DC-3 gave aviation a sense of security. People suddenly had faith in the airplane. This airplane made the airplane look good to everyone. That is why so many people have a soft spot in their heart for the DC-3; a lot of people had their first air travel in one.”

The safety factor would always be of utmost importance to air passengers who, in most cases, did not fly for the thrill of the ride, but to get where they were going quickly and safely. Unfortunately, accidents involving DC-3s claimed the lives of several well-known and celebrated people. Among them was the singer and actress Grace Moore, who died on January 26, 1947 in the crash of a KLM DC-3 shortly after taking off from Copenhagen, on a flight to Stockholm, to continue a concert tour.

Film actor Leslie Howard is probably best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in the 1939 classic Gone With The Wind. Howard was killed on June 1, 1943 when the BOAC DC-3 he was travelling in from Lisbon to London was attacked and shot down over the Bay of Biscay by a Junkers Ju 88 of the German Air Force. Various theories have been put forward over the years as to why the Luftwaffe downed the regularly-scheduled civilian airliner, including the largely discredited notion that they had believed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to have been on board. The more generally accepted theory is that Howard himself was their target, as they believed him to be spying for Britain while in the guise of an entertainer on a goodwill tour. A possible further German motivation might have been to demoralize the British people in time of war through the loss of one of their most famously patriotic celebrities.

The beautiful and talented movie star and comedienne Carole Lombard was one of the best-known and most highly-regarded actresses of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. She was married to the Hollywood idol Clark Gable, who, coincidentally, was another star of Gone With The Wind. Following America’s entry into the Second World War late in 1941, Lombard travelled to Indiana to appear in a bond rally, raising money for the American war effort. Together with her mother, she boarded a TWA DC-3 to return to Los Angeles on the morning of January 16, 1942. The aircraft landed at Las Vegas to refuel. It then took off in a clear evening sky but reportedly went off-course, owing to the wartime blackout of aircraft beacons in the area. Twenty-three minutes after leaving Las Vegas the plane slammed into Double-Up Peak on Mount Potosi. There were no survivors. For her war bond fund-raising efforts, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Lombard the first American woman to be killed during the war in the line of duty and awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was thirty-three. The inconsolable Gable then joined the U.S. Army Air Forces and flew several bombing missions as a B-17 gunner from a base in England.

In 1937 the first examples of what would become known as “black boxes” were installed in the DC-3s of United Airlines. Also known as Flight Analyzers, the devices recorded the aircraft’s altitude, rate of climb, and descent, and when the autopilot was operating and when radio transmission took place. In the event of an accident, they aided investigators in finding the cause. United’s pilots were initially hostile when the devices were adopted, perceiving them as “spies in the sky” and “flying stool pigeons.” Despite their initial objections, however, the black box concept evolved over time into the more sophisticated and vitally important system now used in all commercial aircraft.

In general, with most airlines flying DC-3 equipment by 1938, leading carriers like American, United, TWA, Eastern, and Continental were building up excellent safety records. American, for example, was awarded a National Safety Council citation for having flown more than 410,338,000 passenger-miles without a passenger fatality by that year.

Domestic airlines purchasing DC-3s or DSTs were not only glad to have them, they also appreciated the ease in taking delivery by simply sending a company crew to fly their new plane from the Douglas factory ramp in Santa Monica to their home field. The delivery process was more difficult for foreign customers since the plane did not have trans-oceanic range and had to be delivered by ship as deck cargo. This entailed anti-salt water protection, sealing the airframes with coatings of grease or cosmoline, which added to the overall cost of the purchase. Alternatively, the overseas customer could opt for the aircraft to be delivered by air after installation of temporary additional fuel tanks, and this operation would become the norm following wartime establishment of the North Atlantic Ferry Route for flying American war planes to Europe. After the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, the ferry flights of DC-3s began. One result was that several examples came into the possession of the Nazis—the earliest such incidents arising with the German invasions of Holland and Belgium in 1940. And, early in 1939, the Germans had confiscated several DC-2s and DC-3s in Czechoslovakia when they annexed that country. For a while the Luftwaffe was operating more of the Douglas airliners than the U.S. Army, which had very few of the planes in its inventory at that time.

While no one at Douglas had an inkling of the actual production numbers they would be dealing with over the coming years, they were beginning to understand the impact that the DC-3 was having upon the airlines of the world. Until the advent of the DC-2, American-designed and manufactured airliners had attracted little interest in the world marketplace. With the coming of the DC-3, virtually all other airliner types became obsolete. Most of world airliner sales post-1935 until World War II were made by Douglas Aircraft and most of them were DC-3s. The age of American domination of the airliner market had begun in earnest and, until the formation of the Airbus aircraft consortium in 1970, it continued unchallenged.

The DC-3 faced no significant competition during its main years of development and manufacture. Only the Lockheed Aircraft Company’s 1940 attempt with its Model 18 Lodestar came anywhere near offering as much. However, the far better range of the Douglas plane ruled out the Lodestar as serious airline competition. Most of the Lodestars produced went to the military, with a number of specialty variants made, such as the Ventura bomber. Curtiss-Wright tried competing against the DC-3 with the 36-passenger twin-engine C-W 20 (also in 1940), which was slightly larger and heavier, and was powered by 1,700 hp twin-row Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone engines. The plane was never certificated for commercial airline use, although, ultimately, the U.S. Army ordered it as the C-46 Commando. Due to its shape, some pilots referred to it as “the whale” or the “Curtiss Calamity.” 3,140 of the planes were built between 1940 and 1945 and it gained a measure of fame as a principal workhorse flying “The Hump” (the Himalaya mountains), bringing vitally needed supplies to troops in China from India and Burma (see the chapter, AT WAR).

Until the arrival of the DC-3 on the world market, the best-selling and most widely flown airliner was the Junkers Ju 52 with 4,835 produced in Germany, France, and Spain. These slow but sturdy airliners served in large numbers until well into the 1960s, when most were replaced by DC-3s.

Long before the war, Douglas was in the enviable position of having such a big hit on its hands that the company was unable to keep up with the demand for the DC-3. Consequently, when it received expressions of interest from Japan, Holland, and Russia to manufacture the airplane in their countries under license from the California plane maker, Douglas moved quickly to issue the licenses. Antony Fokker’s firm held the Dutch license and continued to act as European distributor for the plane, but never actually built them. The DC-3 civilian airliner was made in quantity by both the Japanese and Russians beginning in 1938. The Japanese programme began with the importation from Santa Monica of nineteen DC-3s and DC-3As, as well as two unassembled airframes to be used in making patterns. Douglas sent design and technical personnel to Japan to assist in getting their production under way, and between 1939 and 1945 some 487 of the aircraft were produced there. Wartime shortages forced the Japanese to make some compromises to the Douglas design, such as substituting wood for fabric on the control surfaces.

The Russians sent their representative, Boris Lisunov, to Santa Monica in 1938 to learn about the Douglas manufacturing procedures in preparation for his country’s own programme to build the DC-3. It would be known as the Li-2 (Lisunov) and was to be produced in State Aircraft Plant Number 84 near Moscow. However, the German invasion forced the manufacture to be moved to a new plant in Tashkent near the Afghanistan border. The Russian version of the plane would differ from the Douglas civil airliner design far more than the Japanese product. It had larger cargo doors and, most significantly, a 7.2mm machine-gun was fitted in a power turret at the centre of the cabin roof. Some Russian models had bomb racks installed and some were built with side-blister windows for photo-reconnaissance missions. There were also passenger and combined passenger-cargo versions. The primary powerplant used was the 900 hp Shevstov M-62, a Cyclone engine built in Russia under license from Wright. A later version, the Li-3, was powered by American-made Wright Cyclones. In all, the Russians built 2,930 of the type.

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A formation of American Airlines Douglas DC-3s over New York City in the late 1930s.

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A C-47 Skytrain in the troop carrier role.