Word: planing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...With Boeing's 307, DC-4 is the first commercial transport plane with a pressurized cabin. Its passenger compartment will be kept at low-altitude air pressure for passengers' comfort while the plane flies high, above bad weather. Overweather flight has been one of commercial aviation's greatest developments in the last decade, and Douglas planes have taken the lead in making a high curve the shortest traveling distance between any two points in the U. S. DC-4 will heighten the curve, shorten the distance. Without pressurized cabins, planes now fly as high...
...retractable tricycle landing gear, with a large wheel in the nose. Thanks to this forward wheel, DC-4 will always be in flying position, horizontal, tail up. No tail skid is necessary because the tail will never be near the ground. Passengers in sleeper planes will no longer be wakened by the rearward slant at each landing. The plane can take off relatively quickly, can "fly into" a landing. Blind landings will therefore be less dangerous, and, contrary to general belief, fields will not have to be extended for landing nor huge catapults employed to get DC-4 into...
...Like a kangaroo's pouch, DC-4's large belly compartment will enable the plane to carry 6,500 pounds of freight. This is a delight to the airlines, for a 200-lb. transcontinental passenger brings them no more revenue than 200 pounds of air express, and mailbags eat no sandwiches...
...swivel chair with well-oiled casters, Mr. Patterson shuttles back & forth. What has made the papers so many and the shuttling so nervous was a bad situation and a good idea. The bad situation: the wasteful competition between U. S. airlines, particularly in independently developing expensive experimental planes, then all investing in a standard plane-first the DC-2, then the DC-3. The good idea: that U. S. airlines should use the collective knowledge of their engineers, pilots, technical and traffic advisers, eliminate competitive waste by financing a common plane...
...little for the experiment. Nine-tenths of the expenses, which DC-4 will have to pay back by selling itself,* have come out of the well-filled Douglas sock. None of these lines is bound by contract to buy a single DC-4, and presumably will not, unless the plane comes up to all its specifications. And 18 months in the aviation business is a long ime. Early in 1937 T. W. A. and Pan American ordered nine Boeing 307s (Flying Fortresses with transport fuselages), which weighed just under the contract limit. Indications now are that the finshed 307 will...