Jetrader - January/February 2011 - 21

The ATL-98 Carvair was the most extreme modiﬁcation of the DC-4.

a vacation ﬂight to Puerto Rico. Guess she needed a vacation after ﬂying back to JFK. Besides American Airlines service between New York and Los Angeles, American Overseas Airlines used it on their North Atlantic service. The cabins must have been a real mess after bouncing around unpressurized below 10,000 feet for more than 20 to 30 hours including refueling stops. All told, 28 airlines from 12 countries operated the standard versions; approximately 10 aircraft are still airworthy. Other versions of the DC-4 include 71 built in Canada and powered by Rolls-Royce Merlin liquid-cooled engines; 51 were pressurized. British Overseas Airway Corporation (BOAC) renamed them Argonauts and operated 22 on their UK-South Africa routes until 1956. The most extreme modiﬁcation was the Freddie Laker’s ATL-98 Carvair. It looks like a mini piston-engine powered B747 with its ﬂight deck located above the cabin to allow the loading of ﬁve cars and 22 passengers. The extended fuselage with a swing nose door required an enlarged vertical stabilizer similar to that on the DC-7. British Air Ferries operated 18 in the 1960s and early ‘70s from Southend Airport to the Channel Islands and Le Touquet on the French coast where one crashed in 1971. They ﬂew at low altitude and during peak demand turned around in 20 minutes. Of the 21 built, eight crashed worldwide with four in the United States. One crashed in Grifﬁn, Ga., in April 1997. A catastrophic engine failure on take-off caused the aircraft to crash into a vacant Piggly Wiggly supermarket, killing both pilots.

which lacked passable roads in the rainy season and a non-functioning railroad. After six months of structural rework, the aircraft (9QCBG) ﬁrst ﬂew on 16 December 1967; with the name change of the country to Zaire on 19 October 1971, the airline became Air Zaire and the Swingtail continued to haul supplies up-country until July 1976, accumulating in the process a number of repairs to damage caused be errant fork-lift drivers. It ended its days 23 August 1988 by crashing on M’Bamon Island in the Zaire River near Kinshasa. We lost two of the six DC-4s in three years; the ﬁrst in eastern Zaire when with the local NDB transmitter out of order, the pilot descended through the clouds to get a visual ﬁx and slammed headon into the vertical face of a cliff. The black image on the rock was that of a front view from a three-view drawing. It was carrying a load of urgently needed medical supplies for a cholera outbreak. The second accident was at Lisala, Mobuto Sese Seko’s birthplace. The DC-4 was in passenger conﬁguration and the ex-Luftwaffe Lockheed F-104 pilot made a heavy landing, the force of which cracked the right wing main spar, dumping its remaining 100/130 octane fuel while rolling down the runway with what looked like a one-sided gull’s wing. Miraculously it never caught ﬁre and no one was hurt except the pilot’s dignity for failing to set his altimeter to the ﬁeld’s altitude. The equatorial sun soon dried the surface of the runway. We had the aircraft stripped of its components and engines, (we had a working piston engine overhaul facility) and gave the airframe to the villagers, who promptly converted it into pots and pans for sale in the local market. A couple of weeks later I went back up there in our Beech Baron and there was not a dime’s piece of metal left in the bush where we had dragged it to clear the runway. The chief DC-4 pilot told me the DC-4 would sink if the stick was pulled back hard when in landing conﬁguration and speed. One day a pilot wrote up in the maintenance log that there were mice in the galley; the crew chief wrote in the rectiﬁcation column … No cats in stock.

References:
Graham White, Allied Aircraft Piston Engines of World War II, SAE, 1995 www: Wikipedia.com/Douglas/DC-4 etc www. Numerous: DC series with P&W Wasp engines www: Avatar.org/douglas_dc-4 Airliner Tech; Vol 4, DC-6/7; Specialty Press Dependable Engines, Mark P. Sullivan, 2008, AIAA

Author’s note:
In January 1971, Pan Am sent me to Kinshasa, Congo Republic, to take over the technical operations of Air Congo. Walking into the bullet-pock-marked hangars, littered with wrecked UN C-46s from the insurgent war of independence, I saw a DC-4 under service. It was like no other DC-4 I had ever seen other than the car ferry modiﬁed ones in the UK. The tail unit was swung open 90 degrees and mechanics were working on its hinges; a swing tail DC-4? Never heard of it. Now I’ve got one more thing to lose sleep over besides aircraft from ﬁve different manufacturers, a dysfunctional maintenance organization, and a staff of more than 1,300 from a dozen countries, including a French ex-air force colonel. Visiting Sabena engineering in Brussels (they overhauled our two Caravelle 11s JT-8D engines), they told me how at the request of Air Congo, Sabena’s engineering department developed the DC-4 Swingtail so that large freight and cars could be transported in the Congo,

ISTAT Certiﬁed Appraiser

Appraisals & Inspections

Ph: 571.249.8800 - steve@CKAS.aero - Fax: 703.991.4919 Suite 101, 6867 Elm Street, McLean, Virginia 22101 Jetrader 2:34:34 PM 9/16/10 21

Aircraft Engines Spare Parts

Simulators FTDs GSE

496139_CKAviation.indd 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-4 http://www.Avatar.org/douglas_dc-4 http://www.ckas.aero

Jetrader - January/February 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Jetrader - January/February 2011