Douglas DC-2

In the early 1930s, distrust of wooden airframes pushed the American industry towards the all-metal airliner. United Airlines held exclusive rights to the Boeing 247, so its rival TWA issued a specification for an all-metal trimotor. Douglas answered with something more ambitious than the brief: a twin with a tapered cantilever wing, retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propellers, able to keep flying on one engine. The DC-1 prototype flew on 1 July 1933 with twelve seats; the DC-2 was longer, more powerful and carried fourteen passengers in a cabin 66 inches wide. Douglas test pilot Carl Cover took it up for the first time on 11 May 1934, and TWA, the launch customer, ordered twenty.

The design impressed American and European airlines alike. Fokker bought a production licence it never exercised: the aircraft for KLM, LOT, Swissair, CLS and LAPE were built and flown in the United States, shipped across the Atlantic with wings and propellers removed, and erected at airfields near the port of arrival. Airspeed took a British licence under which nothing was built, and only Nakajima in Japan actually assembled aircraft, completing five of its own besides erecting at least one Douglas-built machine. Production between 1934 and 1939 came to 130 civil aircraft and a further 62 for the American armed forces, which gave them a family of designations — XC-32, C-33, YC-34 — and which on entering the Second World War also impressed 24 commercial DC-2s as C-32As.

The DC-2 showed before its celebrated successor that airline travel could be comfortable, safe and dependable, and the proof came quickly. In October 1934 KLM entered its first example, PH-AJU Uiver, in the MacRobertson air race from London to Melbourne: it finished second of twenty entrants, behind only the purpose-built de Havilland DH.88 racer and nearly three hours ahead of the Boeing 247D, and it did so flying its ordinary 9,000-mile commercial route, carrying mail, making every scheduled passenger stop and even turning back once for a stranded passenger. The type also left an unorthodox military trail — the Finnish Air Force received donated aircraft during the Winter War and flew one on a bombing mission in February 1940 — and it is now retired, with several airframes preserved or under restoration in museums in Australia and Finland.