Search Results for: DC-3

Only in California, some might say, could you expect to find a vintage DC-3 transformed into a fund-raising tool/restaurant. But that’s just what visitors to Tomorrow’s Aviation Museum on the Compton Airport in Los Angeles will see when they stop in. With some assistance from American Airlines, a DC-3 fuselage found in a Nevada boneyard […]

If you’re unfamiliar with the YouTube aviation star known as Flight Chops, you have a lot of homework to do. Fortunately, we’re such big fans of pilot Steve Thorne’s work (and chops) that we’re proud to be sharing some of his greatest hits on our website, so you won’t have to go far to catch […]

Breitling’s DC-3 is in the middle of its record-breaking world tour, which started in March and ends in September, making a stop at AirVenture Oshkosh and hitting its last stops before its final destination of the Breitling Sion Airshow in Switzerland. The DC-3, at 77 years old, will be the oldest plane to circumnavigate the […]

A pair of Douglas DC-3s operated by Catalina Flying Boats Air Freight Service have been a part of the Long Beach Airport landscape for nearly 30 years. Recently, the rumble of the twin radial engines that powered the venerable World War II-era transports, lovingly known as Gooney Birds, took off from LGB for the last […]

July 22, 1921: The Douglas Aircraft Co. incorporates, with its main base in Santa Monica, California, in an old movie studio. April 1936: The first Douglas Sleeper Transport is delivered to American Airlines. 1943: The 2,000th C-47 rolls out of the production hangar at Long Beach. 1944: More than 100 C-47s fill the skies over […]

Last week the Museum of Flying at Santa Monica Airport celebrated the 80th anniversary of the first flight of the Douglas DC-3, a flight that took off from SMO on December 17, 1935. A ceremony was held at the newly renovated DC-3 monument right outside the main entrance to the museum. The monument was first […]

My 30-year love affair with DC-3s involved an eclectic agglomeration of pilots — kids working their way up from flying night freight in Aztecs and Beech 18s, corporate and airline retirees with ratings that date back to the ’50s, and grizzled soldiers of fortune who’ve drifted through life hauling “interesting” cargo in interesting parts of […]

More than five decades after a DC-3 carrying a Chilean soccer team disappeared en route to Santiago a group of mountaineers has found a large portion of the wreckage. The top-division Green Cross soccer team had just completed a match in the southern Chilean city of Osorno in April 1961 when its members split up […]

When I was a little girl growing up on the west side of Cincinnati in the ’50s, I was obsessed with airplanes, but the closest I came to any were the distinctive V-tails that flew regularly over our house. And I remember my father saying, “There go the Hogans,” referring to four brothers who operated […]

The passengers were all sound asleep in the back. It would be a shame to awaken them to prepare for the landing. I let them sleep until the very last moment. There had been none of the usual complaints, like “we’re too hot” or “we’re too cold.” They had no inkling of what lay ahead […]