Scotland's Wings by Robert Jeffrey

Author:Robert Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black & White Publishing

13

The Shuttle . . . Turn Up and Go and

Champagne by the Tanker Load

In my layman’s view one plane changed aviation more than any other in history – the Douglas DC3 aka the Dakota. The adjective most used to describe this flying legend is “indestructible”. But it is also, to this day, a beautiful mechanical object. The comment on the Concorde and the Comet often made, “if it looks right it flies right”, could also be applied to the Dakota. It had strong Scottish connections as an early workhorse for British European Airways “BEA” (it stayed in service till 1962), and the old Scottish Airways. It was a familiar sight in Scottish skies for years. So, it is appropriate that the aircraft featured in one of the renowned artist and historian Dugald Cameron’s very many magnificent paintings of early aviation is a Pioneer class DC3 that proudly bore the name “RMA Percy Pilcher”. Many books have been written about the “Dak” and stories of its sturdiness are profuse.

The original design, not surprisingly, was based on the Douglas company’s DC1 and 2, the letter “C” was to indicate commercial rather than military. The new planes were planned to break Boeing’s grip on passenger aviation in America in the early thirties, a move that was largely successful. The first DC1 was a single machine that was built to test new theories of design and was never put into volume production. But its gleaming pristine aluminium structure gave a warning to the early world airlines that the era of the Ford Trimotor and the popular Fokker airliners was under threat. Donald Douglas, the founder of the company that grew to become one of the biggest aircraft building companies in history, was the son of a Brooklyn bank cashier of Scottish descent, maybe the name is a clue. Those Wright brothers are hard to keep out of any flying story and they were the men who set Donald Douglas on the way to fame. As a youngster he had gone to a field in Virginia in 1908 to watch Orville demonstrate a plane for the US Army. He was hooked on flying and the dream that became the Douglas Aircraft Corporation took off.

Right from the start Donald Douglas was insistent of the sort of stress testing that was to lead to the “indestructible DC3” – though flying into a mountain at high speed was still not a particularly good idea. After he saw a contemporary designer in the cockpit of one his planes, lifted on wooden plinths, throwing his weight about he asked what was going on and was told: “I am testing it to see if it is strong enough”. Douglas twigged that the way ahead was to be a tad more sophisticated. The wings of the early DC1, 2 and 3 series, which were of innovative design, were subjected to scientific stress analysis, as were all the other components. To prove the point about the strength of the finished product, journalists were treated to

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