Commercial and Military Aviation 1935-1960 in color

Thanks for those old photos. None of them are as old as I am but they bring back many thoughts. I saw some of them when they were the latest and greatest.

 

Great shots of the Constellation. I always loved the look of that plane. The non- tubular fuselage is so cool. No two cross sections are alike. It must have been very labor intensive and costly to build. It takes me back to my childhood when they were still flying the prop powered airliners into Quad City Airport near where I lived in Moline.

 

Interesting to see the C & S DC-4. Most of the photos I've seen were after the merger with Delta, when the aircraft had "Delta-C & S" logos.

And Constellations are always good to look at.

 

Long ago I read or was told that the fuselage profile was an NACA 23012 airfoil and that they put the circumferencials on that profile. Not a very efficient production method but certainly pretty. The whole airplane is pretty.

 

The first two pics are of Boeing airliners derived from WW II bombers.

B-17 to 307. First pressurized airliner.

B-29 to 377. Suffered from the same unreliable engines and propellers as the B-29.


Neither were very successful.

 

The Connie was even pretty on the ground... looked fast. Long nosegear was part of the 'look'.

I think it had a similar wing to the Lockheed P-38. (Clarence Kelly)

Was also designed to meet the needs of TWA and Howard Hughes, I read somewhere.

 

You jogged my memory by noticing where the shots were taken. The UAL 377 photo was taken on the east side of Boeing Field next to the "B-29 Hangar" where I worked in 1950. The earthen revetment was still there when I was working on the B-50 modification programs. The piled up dirt was to minimize bomb damage during WW2. Beacon Hill is in the background.

 

The first C-97s used the B-29 wings, engines and tail, but most of them, and all the 377s, used the later B-50 wings, engines and tail.

This entailed a change from the Wright R-3350 to the P&W R-4360. Neither engine was particularly reliable, but I think the 4360s were a little better. Most of the early issues with the 377 involved the hollow-blade props rather than the engines, but there will still issues even after the props were replaced.

I think the main problem with the 377 wasn't unreliability so much as the fact that they were more expensive to operate than the DC's and Connies.

 

Correct, Jim. I think that Boeing made a bad choice to go with the "C-97 style" of commercial airliner because of the R-4360 and the rather cumbersome double bubble fuselage. Pax liked the luxury and comfort of it but it was a terribly expensive vehicle to operate and maintain. Changing 56 spark plugs per engine wasn't a job, it was a career when you had to do it on all four engines.

 

Fantastic website, and great pictures!

 

In 1988 I went for a job interview at a Curtis Wright facility (IIC) that was in North Carolina... The job was for a program manager... They took me back to a room in the back of the facility and when he turned on the lights there was a huge transfer line that you put castings in at one end an after some time out popped completed jugs for the turbocompound Wright engine... They said they only fired it up once every 3 years or so and then they made a batch of cylinders, at the time there were still engines flying in China (or so I was told) and that's where the machine ended years later.. I'm sure it's been scrapped by now, but I was amazed that they were still making those things even in 1988...