Wrigley, Boeing and Douglas' Dolphin

The first production Douglas Dolphin sits at Clover Field in Santa
Monica during its flight test tenure.

It must have been a couple of very good days for Donald Douglas, the days that William Wrigley Jr.'s son and Bill Boeing came to buy airplanes. The latter was something of a coup, I should expect. It helped, to be sure, that the plane had been a pet project of Douglas, who designed it personally. Having experienced a string of successes in building military observation aircraft - especially planes built for the Navy - Donald set about to design something decidedly different, a luxurious commercial flying yacht. He called it the "Sinbad". What resulted was a twin-engined, aluminum-hulled flying boat that seated six to eight passengers, and even had a lavatory in the back.

Problem was, it was a flying boat - stuck in the water. Douglas realized that the utility of the aircraft, and hopefully the sales, would be so much enhanced if it were an amphibian, with retractable land-lubber gear. So Douglas tweaked the design a bit, and the plane entered production as an amphibian called the Dolphin. If you look carefully under the wing of our image of the week above, you'll note the registration number: X-967Y, which indicates that this was the first production Dolphin (Douglas tended to use registration numbers that ended in "Y" for their developmental aircraft), while it was still considered an experimental aircraft.

The aircraft was amazingly quiet and a great performer, everything that Donald had dreamed of. (In 1931, Flight Magazine wrote a glowing pilot report about the Dolphin, which you can read here.) It's just that his timing was wrong. By the time that the Sinbad was under construction, the 1929 stock market crash bankrupted many of the members of the market that Douglas had hoped to sell the planes too. By the time that the first Dolphin flew in 1930, America was deep into the Great Depression.

This is a detail cropping of one of the
photos featured with the Douglas DC-1
article three weeks ago, and shows one of
the Army's Dolphins at Clover Field.

But although Douglas had designed the plane as a commercial venture, it was the military that bought the majority of the Dolphins produced. With the success of X-967Y, the Sinbad was retrofitted with retractable wheels, and was picked up, along with 13 Dolphins, by the U.S. Coast Guard, which designated them variously RD-1, RD-2 and RD-4, during 1931-1934. The U.S. Navy bought nine (three of which were later turned over to the USMC), three RD-2s and six RD-3s. One of the Navy Dolphins was converted into a Presidential aircraft for Franklin Roosevelt, although there is no record of him actually using it (in 1933, Popular Science raved about the new Presidential "Mayflower of the Air").

It was natural to think of these planes serving the in the Navy and Coast Guard, but what's surprising is that the Army Air Corps picked up 24 aircraft - that's one more than the USN and USCG combined! With the USAAC, the Dolphins were designated variously as C-21, C-26A, C-26B and C-29. The Argentinian Navy also bought one.

However, there were still a few civilian folks out there who could afford such a plane, and in the case of the Dolphin, it was chewing gum to the rescue. Or at least the money from chewing gum. William Wrigley Jr. had made millions selling chewing gum to America, sort of by accident. The company he founded actually started out selling things like soap and baking powder, and as a sales incentive, packaged chewing gum in each container. Thing is, the chewing gum turned out to be more popular than the soap and baking power, and a fortune was thus made. Wrigley tended to spend his fortune on things he loved, namely his Chicago Cubs baseball team and his favorite get-away-spot, Santa Catalina Island. In 1919 Wrigley bought the Santa Catalina Island Company, and got the actual island thrown in for free.

NC-967Y is a cover girl, gracing the front of
Arcadia Publishing's Catalina by Air, a
must-have book for anyone who loves flying
boats. Because of the narrowness of the cove
in which the first Catalina Airport was built,
the designers created a wooden turntable,
which our aircraft sits on in this view. The
ocean is just out of the scene to the right.

Wrigley Junior's only son, Philip K. Wrigley, was also heavily involved with is Dad in the development of the island, and he just so happened to have served in the Navy as the head of training for aviation mechanics. Now, Pacific Marine Airways and Western Air Express had already been serving Catalina, but in 1931 he decided he could do it better himself, terminated the contracts with the other carriers, and set up the Wilmington-Catalina Airlines, Ltd.

To serve the island Philip Wrigley selected Douglas' new Dolphin, buying the first two production aircraft, NC-967Y and NC-14204, making the Dolphin the very first Douglas airliner. The website Catalina Goose has a wonderful selection of images of the two Wilmington-Catalina Dolphins in service. With the Dolphin, the 27 mile channel was transited in only 15 minutes. The two aircraft faithfully served until September 1942, when the Coast Guard shut down all civilian transportation between the island and the mainland.

Pan Am was the only other airline to buy Dolphins, purchasing a pair for use by their China National Aviation Corp. subsidiary.

And then there was Bill Boeing. In 1934, while he was still at his namesake Boeing Company, he bought a Dolphin, which he named Rover, from his rival for his own personal use. Later, when he decided he needed something bigger, he traded up to a Douglas DC-5. Rover went through several other owners, including serving with Catalina Channel Air Service in the 1960s. It would become the only surviving Dolphin, now on display at the US National Museum of Naval Aviation.

Super Snoopy!

From the vaults of the Mojave Transportation Museum...

DC-7BF Super Snoopy on the ramp at the 1970 California 1000 race in Mojave.
Cathy Hansen photo via the Mojave Transportation Museum

"Curses, Red Baron," said Snoopy...

While it's unclear whether the famed Beagle's appearance at the 1970 California 1000 Unlimited Air Race at Mojave was officially sanctioned by Charles Schultz, it was one certainly worth Snoopy's reputation. Unlike the much shorter Unlimited-class races held at the Reno National Air Races, Mojave's California 1000 was just that: 1,000 miles of closed-course, low-altitude flying around a set of pylons in the Mojave desert, the longest such race ever held. It caused the teams to have to rethink their strategies, as the race length would far exceed the typical Unlimited's fuel range. Thus, pit stops would be part of the mix.

Famed pilot Clay Lacy was no stranger to Unlimited racing, his bright purple P-51 Mustang was a regular at Reno. But for the California 1000, held on November 15, 1970, he came up with a different strategy: find a plane with long legs. He came up with the idea of using an ex-American Airlines DC-7BF freighter, N759Z, which was owned by California Airmotive's Allen Paulson. In raw speed, it was no match for the highly-tuned Mustangs, Sea Furies and Bear Cats that normally raced, but what it lacked in flat-out, it made up for in stamina, able to fly the entire race non-stop, with no visits to the pits.

The plane wore Lacy's traditional race number 64, and was flown by him along with Paulson (they shared the title of "co-captain", along with Snoopy himself) and FE Joe Matos. The race was started differently than the ones at Reno, with all the aircraft lined up on the runway at the same time, with position based on qualifying times...except the DC-7, which had to start last because of its size. But Snoopy came through, and finished a respectable sixth out of twenty, in a race won by a Sea Fury that averaged 344 mph. Clay said at the time, "We used METO power (Maximum Except Take-Off) and flew at an indicated airspeed of 355 mph. Speed averaged about 325 mph because of time lost on the pylons. The G load was limited to 2.2 and we used an average 60-70 degree bank. The aircraft consumed 4,100 gallons of 145 octane fuel and 80 gallons of 70 SAE Pennzoil!"

The presence of Super Snoopy certainly got the racing community's attention, and when Paulson decided to race a Lockheed Super Constellation (named the Red Baron) against Snoopy in a 1000-mile Unlimited race in San Diego, the rest of the racing community cried foul and refused to participate. In the end, the two four-engine propliners sat out the event, never to race again. The DC-7 was eventually scrapped in Beruit, Lebanon, in 1985.

Want to see the Red Baron? Check out this web site, which tells much the same story.

A wonderful old film of the race can be seen here.

The Gull-Wing Douglas

Today's photo is another from a collection of vintage Douglas photos that we've been featuring for the last several weeks. Last week's photo showed a DC-2 being looked at by a couple of gentlemen...and if you look closely, you'll recognize the same two in today's photo, walking off into the background. These images were taken on the grounds of Santa Monica's Clover Field, probably sometime in early or mid July, 1934 (TWA took delivery of the DC-2 from last week on July 20, 1934, so these would likely have been taken just shortly before).

The Douglas O-2 biplane observation aircraft had been a relative success with the USAAC, and Douglas wanted to follow up with a more modern monoplane design, the O-31. The USAAC signed a contract with Douglas in January 1930 for two prototype aircraft, which were to be designated XO-31. Powered by a Curtiss V-1570 Conquerer V-12 water-cooled engine, the two-place design utilized a wire-reinforced, fabric-covered gull-wing with an all-aluminum fuselage, the aft portion of which was corrugated for strength.

After the first of the pair flew in December 1930, it was back to the drawing board, as the aircraft was found to have lateral stability issues. Several different vertical stabilizer designs were tried. Instead of delivering the second aircraft as an XO-31, it was redesignated the YO-31, and sported a larger tail and longer cowling. This second aircraft is the one seen in today's photo. Subsequently a number of additional YO-31A and O-31 aircraft were produced (13 in all), before Douglas switched to the O-43 design, which was ordered in 1934, the same year as this photo was taken. It uncertain how long the YO-31 survived, or what became of it, but it clearly was still at Clover field three years after being built.

(A special shout-out this week to Josh Nyhus of APSoCal for his invaluable help in identifying this plane...when I got the photo, I had a Dickens of a time figuring it out. Tip o' the hat to Ian Hall for trying to solve the mystery, as well. Thanks, guys!)

Mojave Dakota

Yes, that really is snow in Mojave! This is probably the hangar now occupied
by XCOR Aerospace, one of the New Space rocket-development companies
that now call the Mojave Spaceport "home".

No, Mojave isn't in the Dakotas, the Dakota is in Mojave. Since we've featured posts about the DC-1 and a DC-2, it seemed natural for this mid-week update to feature the final version of the Gooney Bird, the "Super DC-3". Unfortunately for Douglas, this upgrade of the tried-and-true was not a good seller commercially, but the Navy did have 100 of its R4D Dakotas upgraded to the R4D-8, with the Super DC-3 tail.

This rare photo is from the Mojave Transportation Museum archives, and originally came from GySgt B.M. Rebenstorf via Cathy Hansen. Because MCAAS Mojave was a training base associated with MCAS El Toro, there was frequent need for shuttle flights between the two bases, and so Mojave had an R4D-8 permanently assigned to it.

From Santa Monica to South America

With the overwhelming success of the Douglas DC-1 (see last week's post), TWA immediately ordered 25 DC-2s. The subject of our post today is DC-2-112 NC13719 (c/n 1245), which was the nineth DC-2 built. Like the DC-1 photos featured last week, this image came in a stack of vintage Douglas photographs, presumably from the estate of a Douglas employee.

The DC-2 is seen here at Clover Field, in Santa Monica, the home of the Douglas Aircraft Corp. Because she was delivered to TWA on July 20, 1934, this photo of it at Santa Monica was probably taken sometime just before that.
TWA operated NC13719 for about three years, where it wore fin number 309, and then sold it along with several sister aircraft, to Braniff on July 29, 1937, where it was assigned fin number 409.

With WWII in full swing and the need for air transportation assets at an all-time high, NC13719 was one of 24 commercial DC-2s that were "drafted" by the Defense Supply Corp. in June 1942 and almost immediately transferred to the Army Air Corps; there it was designated a C-32A and assigned the serial number 42-61096. A year later, she was back at TWA, since the carrier had contracted with the Army Air Corps to provide pilot training using Army aircraft.

In September 1944, with newer aircraft now available, the DC-2 was considered surplus, and started hopping from one South American airline to another. First, it was sold to Transportes Aéreos Centroamericanos (TACA) in Mexico, and then in August 1945 to Aerovias Brasil S.A. Empresa de Transportes in Rio de Janeiro. In April, '46 it was transfered to its final owner, Aerovias S.A. Belo Horizonte. On February 5, 1947 the venerable DC-2 crashed at Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais, Brazil, although without any fatalities.

Our Lady of the Douglases

A crowd has gathered around TWA's new airliner, the
Douglas DC-1. Note the "X" replacing the normal "NC" on
the tail number, and the Douglas Dolphin in the background.

Stuck in the back of a cabinet in an antique store was a small stack of photos that caught my eye. On the top was what looked like a TWA DC-3. As I thumbed through them, I knew that this stack was something special. In it there were various different Douglas aircraft from the early 1930s, including four of the TWA plane, so I'm guessing these were left over from an estate of a former Douglas employee (the images of the other Douglas aircraft in the lot will be shared in upcoming posts).

But the more I looked at the TWA photographs, the more I realized that this wasn't a DC-3...the tail was all wrong...and then there was the registration number, which started with an "X" rather than an "NC". So I dug into the research, and found that indeed this wasn't a DC-3...it wasn't even the earlier DC-2. This was the one and only DC-1, the plane that started it all. And since Santa Monica's Clover Field was wide open to the public, a lot of local folks appear in the photos, there to watch this new, shiny bird take flight.

If you look closely, you can see small winglets spanning
the gap between the engine nacelles and the fuselage.
These were reportedly removed soon after the first flight,
and don't appear in the last photo, below, when the plane
was operational.

Like so many of the other stories that I'm finding behind these little photographs, this one is truly remarkable. Two weeks ago, this blog featured a Fokker Trimotor photo, and it was the crash of a TWA Fokker F.10 in 1931 that led directly to these DC-1 images even being possible. It certainly wasn't the first Trimotor to crash with loss of life, but the presence of famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne on the passenger and casualty list guaranteed a lot of media attention to this accident, and the investigation that followed, and ultimately, it was that high profile attention that led to major changes in the commercial aviation industry, and the governmental bodies that oversaw it.

Gone were the wooden airliners, the age of the shiny metal birds was here. It was still an age of monopolies, however, and with the corporate connections between Boeing and United Airlines, that manufacturer's total initial output of its new all-metal Model 247 was taken by United. Thus did TWA's Jack Frye approach Donald Douglas about a new type of plane, one that would compete - and even beat - Boeing's airliner. Douglas later called the letter he received from Frye requesting a Douglas proposal the “birth certificate of the DC ships". Price for the one prototype Douglas agreed to build: $125,000 (that would be about $2 million in 2011 dollars).

The DC-1 is readied for flight. Presumably, that is Douglas VP
of Sales and Chief Test Pilot Carl Cover who can be seen
through the open cockpit side window.

I'm pretty certain that these photos were taken on July 1, 1933, the day of the DC-1's first flight. The flight almost became a disaster. Carburetor floats that had been installed backwards at the factory in both of the Wright R-1820 engines caused them to quit whenever the pilots pitched the nose up. The first time they quite was just after takeoff, and the plane would have hit the ground except for the fact that the land dropped off just beyond the end of the runway. With the nose down, the engines sputtered back to life, only to quite again. Douglas Chief Test Pilot Carl Cover's expert airmanship saved the day, and he executed an emergency landing on a nearby golf course without further incident. (Note: Some online references note his name as "Carl Clover", but Bill Yenne's authoritative book McDonnell Douglas, as well as several other references, use "Cover".)

But once that was fixed, performance of the DC-1 was phenomenal. Cover is known to have commented "She was born to fly, and she belongs up there with the angels." On September 4, 1933, the final test flight to demonstrate compliance with TWA’s demanding specifications was flown: immediately after X223Y took off from hot and high Winslow, Arizona with TWA pilots Eddie Allen and Tommy Tomlinson at the controls, one engine was shut down and the crew turned the nose towards Albuquerque, the highest airfield that TWA then served. One of the requirements that Frye had listed in the original letter to Douglas demanded the ability for the aircraft to safely operate with an engine out at the airlines highest airport. The DC-1 handled the challenge easily. On September 15, TWA took initial delivery of the aircraft, which carried a restricted airworthiness certificate, and the registration NR223Y.

Two months later, on November 15, with Donald Douglas himself on board, they had to use this capability for real, when one engine failed over the continental divide, Cover turned back and landed at Albuquerque. Douglas is said to have later remarked, "Here was the TWA requirement, for real, but you could hardly tell back in the cabin. It was like nothing happened."

Ground crew personnel meet NC223Y as she taxis to a stop,
Glendale. This appears to have been the first in a series of
images taken that day, and another a few moments later
can be seen on this City of Glendale website. 

Shortly after TWA took initial possession of the aircraft, they returned it to Douglas, which used the DC-1 for a couple of months as a test bed, including replacing the original engines with higher horsepower Wright Hornets for a short time. After a flight test program that encompassed over 200 flights, the plane was finally delivered to TWA in December, 1933, as NC223Y and went into commercial service. It wore the nose number “300” (thus becoming known within the carrier as “Old 300”) and was christened the City of Los Angeles.

On February 18, 1934, two hours before the official end of all air mail contracts, Jack Frye and Eddie Rickenbacker delivered the last commercially-carried sacks of airmail on a flight from Burbank to Newark onboard NC223Y. In doing so, they set a transcontinental speed record for transport-class aircraft of 13 hours and 4 minutes. Just a bit more than a year later, on April 30, 1935, Old 300 set another record, of 11 hours, 5 minutes for a flight from Los Angeles to New York.

Beginning in April, 1934, the plane was operated regularly on TWA's New York-Pittsburgh route until it was withdrawn from service in 1936. Reregistered as NS223Y, it was loaned to the government for a short time for some high altitude research flights.

The records caught the attention of one of the major shareholders in TWA, Howard Hughes, who bought the DC-1 from the airline, with the intention of setting an even more ambitious speed record, a round-the-world one. He had the aircraft modified with extra fuel tanks and larger 875hp Wright Cyclone engines in preparation for the trip. But it was not to be. The maverick millionaire changed his mind, and instead decided to use a Lockheed Lodestar. Old 300 was used a few times by Hughes as a corporate plane, but mostly sat unused at Burbank until it was sold in May , 1938.

The buyer was the English Viscount Forbes, Earl of Granard, who intended to set a transatlantic speed record with it. Again, however, plans fell through. He did take the plane to England, and flew it to the Continent a few times, but didn’t really have a lot of use for the plane.

Some mystery surrounds what happened next, as the venerable DC-1 got involved in the Spanish Civil War. The Earl sold the plane to the French SFTA (the Société Française des Transports Aériens), but a month later, it was in the Spanish Republic wearing the titles of the Spanish carrier LAPE, with camo paint covering her once shiny skin. The plane was operated on the Paris-Toulouse-Barcelona route until March 1939 and the fall of Barcelona to Franco. The DC-1 was even used to carry Republican government officials into exile in France.

After the war ended in April, 1939, the DC-1 was turned over to the new government, and was named Manuel Negron, registered as EC-AAE and placed into commercial service with Iberia Airlines, flying the Seville-Malaga-Tetuan route. One day in December, 1940, the pilot had just rotated and started climbing away from Malaga’s runway, when both engines quit, hauntingly reminiscent of what happened on Old 300’s first flight. But this time, the old girl’s luck had run out, and she overran the runway. No one was hurt, but the plane was far beyond repair. (The Goleta Air and Space Museum's website has a photo of the wrecked aircraft here.)

At this point, legend takes over, as there is no confirmation of the rest of this story, although it is oft-repeated by aviation historians. While the DC-1 was indeed beyond repair, locals claim that part of her aluminum structure was salvaged to construct an andas, a ceremonial throne which is used to carry a statue of the Madonna from Our Lady of Hope in Malaga during the annual Holy Week festivals.