Search Results for: DC-3

For what seemed like forever—OK, so it was four weeks—I was housebound late last winter, hobbling around with a humongous cast on my right foot. Weather was consistently gray, cold and brutal in the Ohio Valley and moping around the house isn’t my style, but I got through, reasonably sane, thanks to some great memories. […]

Herding 15 C-47 and DC-3 aircraft for a trip across the Atlantic was no small task, but the D-Day Squadron did just that to help commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Next week, 10 of the Squadron’s airplanes will visit AirVenture in Oshkosh. The D-Day Squadron is hosting a press conference on Thursday, […]

A prominent Alaskan airline and tour company voluntarily ceased operations in late May after two fatal crashes involving its floatplanes in a week. A total of six people, most of them cruise ship passengers, died May 13 when two Taquan aircraft collided while taking the passengers on a flightseeing trip. On May 21, a pilot and passenger died when a Taquan commuter flight from Ketchikan to Metlakatla Harbor cartwheeled on landing and came to rest inverted with the cabin submerged. On May 22, the airline issued a statement saying it had stopped flying indefinitely and that the tragedies left the company and staff reeling.

The event took years to plan, months to prepare, weeks to position and practice—and one day to execute. On the early evening of June 5, 2019, as clouds brooded over the Normandy countryside, a formation of Douglas C-47s and other DC-3 variants delivered on the mission to re-create a critical paratrooper drop commemorating the 75th […]

“When the kids came over in 1944, they didn’t have GPS…they didn’t have 500 hours of time in the cockpit between them,” says Doug Rozendaal, pilot of That’s All Brother, a Douglas C-47 joining the 2019 D-Day Squadron in an epic trip across the Atlantic Ocean this week. He considers his crew very fortunate: Not […]

Right in time for the busy summer flying season, after several months of work on the surface of Runway 04-22 at Catalina Island’s Airport in the Sky (KAVX), also called ACE Clearwater Airfield, pilots can finally pop over for the immensely popular Buffalo burgers at the mountaintop airport’s restaurant – the DC-3 Gifts & Grill […]

Thirty-some years ago, when the FAA was actually paying me to go to Griffin, Georgia, and fly Bob McSwiggan’s DC-3, I heard about this larger-than-life guy named Stan Brock. To hear people talk, he was Ernie Gann, Indiana Jones and Mother Teresa wrapped up into one. A famous, handsome, adventurous Brit living like a monk, […]

Upon raising the landing gear after takeoff, the gear motor continued to operate longer than normal, and the pilot heard an abnormal sound toward the end of the sequence. The right main gear was hanging at about a 45-degree angle, and the left main gear was not visible. The pilot completed the appropriate checklists, without change. The pilot declared an emergency and ATC confirmed during a fly-by that the main gear was not extended. During the landing, the nose gear remained extended and the two main gear were retracted. The airplane came to rest on the runway and the passengers egressed without further incident.

Work to restore the well-worn runway at Catalina Airport (KAVX), located on the island outside the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is well underway. More than 100 U.S. Marines and Navy sailors, who are working with the Catalina Island Conservancy as part of a partnership with the Department of Defense, arrived in January to begin work […]

In 2018, a Junkers Ju 52 crashed in the Swiss Alps while attempting to cross a 10,000-foot saddle from south to north amid gusting winds.