Le DC-3 : l'avion qui a changé le monde. Diffusé par la télévision publique en 1985.

Video from the channel Dave Lee Photo about Douglas DC-3, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 54:48. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary broadcast by Seattle public television in 1985, marking the 50th anniversary of the Douglas DC-3. It begins in Boston, comparing a DC-10 with a still-flying DC-3, and tells how the aircraft made airlines grow, taught the public to fly, and helped win the Second World War. It includes testimony from some of its designers, from pilots, from American Airlines' earliest flight attendants, and from companies still operating it in the 1980s.

The piece reviews the advances that made the DC-3 possible: the cantilever-wing monoplane, air-cooled radial engines, NACA's low-drag cowling, the stressed-skin monocoque fuselage of Jack Northrop's Lockheed Vega, and radio-beam navigation. In 1931 a wood-and-metal TWA Fokker trimotor crashed in Kansas carrying Knute Rockne, and wooden aircraft were doomed from then on. Jack Frye, of TWA, could not get the Boeing 247 because the first production run was for United, so he sent a letter to five manufacturers. The team of Donald Douglas and Arthur Raymond proposed a twin-engined aircraft instead of the requested trimotor. The DC-1 flew in July 1933 and passed the Lindbergh test: crossing the Rockies with one engine out. Only one was ever built. Its lengthened version, the 14-seat DC-2, was sold to TWA (25 units), and in October 1934 a KLM DC-2 came second in the MacRobertson race from England to Australia. C. R. Smith, of American Airlines, asked for a wider DC-2 for berth service, and the first DC-3 flew on 17 December 1935.

The DC-3 carried 21 seats by day or 14 berths by night, engines of about 1,000 hp, and a wingspan 10 feet greater than the DC-2's. It was the first aircraft to serve hot meals on board. By 1939 more than 400 had been built, and it carried 80% of US domestic passenger traffic. As the C-47 and R4D, 10,174 units were built during the war, at a rate of up to two per hour, and it was key on D-Day and in the Pacific. In 1985 more than a thousand were still flying: Salair, with 11 aircraft, carried freight and fish in Alaska; Basler rebuilt them in Oshkosh; and Provincetown-Boston Airline operated 12, including the one with the most flight hours in the world, with more than 88,000.