Just saw a TV segment on the Russians drilling into a lake under the Antarctic ice (good on them) and the aircraft they showed supporting the expedition was either a DC-3/C-47 or, more likely, the version they produced. Either way this design, over 70 years old, is still going strong!
As a very young child, aged about five, my first plane flights were in the mid-1950s in a later civilian version of the DC3, or Dakota as we called them, which was the DC 6B.
Main memory is the joy of being given barley sugars to suck on as we descended to land to stop our ears popping in unpressurised aircraft.
Along with the Caribou and Hercules, they were planes which with some determined design and production probably could have been kept flying for longer than they did as very reliable aerial workhorses.
There is a Dakota still flying down here for fun flights http://shortstop.com.au/info/package-silver-clipper-dinner-flights
I went through one a few years ago at the air force museum. It was a lot smaller and more primitive than I recalled from my early childhood flights.
Buffalo Airways in Canada still use DC3’s although on a recent programme they are starting to find it harder to get the fuel for the engines as it is now not commonly used by aircraft.
I was about to mention this, they also have another anarchic cargo craft that I want to call a “Globemaster,” but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong…
I remember taking DC-3’s between the islands of the Marianas Chain in the late 1960’s and we considered them antiques even then. I was stationed on Guam for a year and a half and visited Rota, Tinian and Saipan. It was quite a thrill to land on former Japanese airstrips that still had bomb craters in outlying areas. There were still rusting hulks off Saipan’s beaches, burnt-out tanks in the jungle, and the southern end of the island had restricted access because ordnance was still exploding now and then.
JohnB
Buffalo Airways seems to have a remarkable fleet. I note from their site that they also fly four wartime Consolidated PBY Catalinas - “Cansos” in view of their Canadian construction. These old flying boats have been reconditioned as water bombers, and are used to help control forest fires. Who says romance is dead ? Best regards, JR.
In the 1970s I flew from Puerto Rico to Charlotte Amalie in the USVI in an Antilles Airboat, landing in the extinct crater that is Charlotte Amalie’s spacious harbor. The plane was built by Martin, but I saw about a dozen or so other seaplanes next to the ramp that lifted us out of the water. I may be mistaken, but I thought that Maureen O’Hara or another film star owned that air line. I’m almost sure that there were a couple of old Catalinas rusting gracefully (or not) in the distance. I also have a wonderful picture from the 1930s of a DC-2 with an awe-struck crowd around it taken somewhere in Batavia. The markings on the plane are Koningklijke Luchtvaart Maatshapij, or KLM.