The Little Airplane That Could : Lots of Love Lavished on the Low-Tech DC-3 : Douglas Plane Celebrating 50 Years in the Air

And he was the co-pilot.

"It was so routine . . . we'd been flying the (DC) 1s a lot and then the DC-2 and so the (DC) 3 was just another airplane in the line . . . no, I don't remember the first flight at all."

Collbohm is 78. Carl Cover, the Douglas test pilot who commanded that first flight, died in a plane crash in the '40s. Fred Herman, a Douglas engineer and third person aboard the airplane, is dead. Of natural causes. But Art Raymond survives. He is 86 and lives in Brentwood. In 1935 he was vice president of engineering at Douglas Aircraft. Then there's Ivar Shogran, power plant engineer, living in Laguna Hills; Bailey Oswald, aerodynamicist of West Los Angeles; and Mal Oleson of Pacific Palisades, project engineer for the 1936-46 production life of the airplane . . . men of the original team whose longevity to date has been a pretty close match for their airplane.

A Common Question

And to these aviators, at their reunions, from biographers and talk show hosts come the common question: What touch of genius or miracle was performed in building this airplane?

"Nothing, really," Raymond said. "As a matter of fact, the DC-3 was two-thirds done before we started because we were so far ahead (in design and development) with work done on the DC-1 and the DC-2."

The DC-1 (Douglas Commercial No. 1) was built in 1933. The DC-2 flew a year later. Both were built to answer airline demands for larger, faster, warmer, quieter, safer, less expensive alternatives to air travel in biplanes, open cockpits and the clanking Tri-Motors of Ford and Fokker. And they were born as other branches of industry were breaking through with ingenuity upon innovation.

Said Raymond: "So we just did the best we could by taking advantage of (new) things such as cowled (for streamlining) engines, wing flaps (for improved low-speed control), variable pitch propellers (for maintaining engine efficiency), retractable gear, sound insulation and moncoque (stress borne by fuselage shell) engineering, the egg-crate design.

Model T of the Air

"Just like the Model T, the DC-1 filled a niche, but it wasn't a perfect airplane by any means. Then there was the DC-2, basically the same airplane but modified and improved. With the '3, we were able to concentrate on what we already had and the problems of the past . . . and to make a number of improvements, rounding out the fuselage for three abreast seating, probably the first of the so-called wide bodies, going to improved engines."

The era certainly helped: "It was an airplane built in a time when product life was designed to be indefinite."

The state of the aviation arts provided an assist: "Unlike the sophistications of today, our airplane was a basic design with basic engineering and basic purpose."

Then there were the unknown subtleties duplicating whatever fortunate formulas gave the world Zippo lighters and Victor mousetraps: "I guess it was a combination of elements, all intangible. But there does come a time when all things come together and that certainly was the case with the DC-3."

Mal Oleson flew new DC-3s in 1936. Last year, he commanded an old DC-3 on a charter to Mexico. In between he has logged 5,000 hours with the airplane, flown later generations of DC jets and celebrated his 75th birthday.

"It's not a fast airplane," goes his critique. "It is longitudinally and laterally unstable and you find that out the hard way . . . but, shoot, it was the best thing flying in its day when people didn't know what longitudinal stability meant.

"And it's around today mainly because there's still not another airplane with that payload that can get in and out of short fields at slow speed."

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Within a business as romantic and as dashing as flying, exaggerations are common, superlatives shaky and the truth has a habit of diminishing with altitude.

But for this year's anniversary of the maiden flight of the DC-3 from Clover Field (now disappeared, urbanized and enlarged as Santa Monica Municipal Airport) the problem will be balancing all that is absolutely legendary with everything that is truly extraordinary about the airplane.

Passengers: A census in the December issue of Flight International, a British periodical, notes that of 10,926 DC-3s built in the United States (an estimated 3,200 were built under license by Japan and Russia) about 375 (of a surviving 1,500 or so) remain in regular service with 150 airlines from Florida to Ethiopia. Provincetown-Boston Airlines, the nation's largest commuter airline, operates a dozen DC-3s on short runs, including a 1937 model that has logged more flying time than any other commercial passenger plane in the Western world. As of a recent tally, this grand dowager had flown 87,584 hours and still sets a new record with every takeoff.