The DC-3 Story : The Plane that changed the World I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY

Video from the channel SLICE History about Douglas DC-3, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 52:19. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A documentary tracing the successive lives of the Douglas DC-3: luxury passenger aircraft, military transport in the Second World War, mainstay of the Berlin Airlift, gunship in Vietnam and, now converted to turboprops, a polar research platform. The narrative alternates with the restoration of vintage aircraft at Basler Turbo Conversions in Oshkosh, and with private owners such as Swiss businessman Hugo Mathys or the Moss family in Florida.

The DC-3 was born in California in 1936. Its first customer, American Airlines, ordered it with a simple handshake, and the sleeper version made it possible to cross the United States in about 15 hours with three stops. It outclassed the German Ju 52, limited to 15 passengers, and Swissair chose it in 1936, becoming Douglas's first European customer. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, civilian DC-3s were requisitioned and converted into C-47s, and hundreds were supplied to Britain and the Soviet Union. On D-Day, about 850 transports dropped paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division and towed gliders over Normandy; veteran Ed Shames recalls the fear, the anti-aircraft fire and the scattering of units, some 50 miles from their drop zone. In 1948, facing the Soviet blockade, the aircraft supplied about two million Berliners through three air corridors, and pilot Gail Halvorsen dropped sweets on small parachutes. In Vietnam, the AC-47 version, nicknamed "Puff the Magic Dragon," fired up to 6,000 rounds per minute from three guns on its left side.

More than 16,000 units were built in ten years. Each of its two radial engines has 14 cylinders, totalling 2,400 horsepower; overhauling the 14 cylinders of one engine cost $50,000. The C-47 "That's All, Brother," which led the invasion, turned up forgotten in Basler's scrapyard some 70 years later. The Alfred Wegener Institute operates two turboprop DC-3s: the Polar 6 flies at about 300 km/h and uses the EM-Bird sensor to measure sea ice thickness from 25 m up.