Douglas DC-4 Aviation Traders ATL-98 Carvair

The Aviation Traders ATL-98 Carvair is the most unusual reincarnation of the Douglas DC-4: a car-carrying air ferry born at Southend, on the Thames estuary, out of surplus airframes of the Douglas four-engined airliner and its military twin, the C-54 Skymaster. It was not Douglas's idea but that of the British entrepreneur Freddie Laker, whose aircraft- and spares-trading company Aviation Traders (Engineering) Limited was looking in the late 1950s for a cheap successor to the Bristol 170 Freighter, the aircraft that had carried cars and their owners across the English Channel for the car ferry airlines since the late 1940s.

The Freighter's main weakness was its limited car payload: even the long-nosed Mark 32 took only three cars and about twenty passengers. With so little margin, a booked car failing to turn up cut the payload by a third and made the flight unprofitable, and the problem was getting worse because British cars were growing: the average car of 1959 was 25 centimetres longer than in 1950. Add the extreme seasonality of the trade, which left aircraft idle outside the peak months, and the structural fatigue caused by short, low-altitude hops in turbulent air with turnarounds of as little as 20 minutes, which forced expensive modification programmes, and the type's operating costs on low-yield routes were hard to bear.

The opportunity came with the jets. As the major airlines replaced their piston airliners with Boeing 707s and Douglas DC-8s on their prestige long-haul routes, the price of a second-hand DC-4 fell to as little as £50,000, and converting an airframe into a car-passenger carrier cost about £80,000 more, sums well within the reach of the small ferry operators. Laker made his case with a cardboard model of a DC-4 fitted with a nose door and a flight deck raised above the fuselage, and the sums showed a payload clearly better than that of the Freighter or Superfreighter. The new aircraft, christened Carvair (from "car via air"), was designed to carry five average-sized British cars and 25 passengers in the DC-4's longer and wider fuselage; the type's lack of pressurisation, a drawback elsewhere, suited low-level cross-Channel flying and made the structural conversion straightforward. It was even thought that, within fifteen years, pressurised DC-6 and DC-7 airframes might yield a larger second-generation Carvair, a plan that never materialised.

The conversion replaced the forward fuselage with a new section 8 ft 8 in longer, the flight deck moved up into a bulbous hump above the hold, anticipating the layout of the Boeing 747, to make room for a hydraulically operated, sideways-hinged nose door that swung open to port. According to the German-language sources, the cockpit rose by about 2.08 metres, the resulting unobstructed hold was 24.74 metres long and up to 2.03 metres high, the rear bulkhead was moved 1.2 metres aft and the whole set of changes added about 900 kilograms, offset by savings in the interior. More powerful wheel brakes were needed, as was an enlarged tail, often thought to be a DC-7 unit but actually a completely new design. The four Pratt & Whitney R-2000 Twin Wasp radials were unchanged. Work on the first conversion began in October 1960 and the prototype, G-ANYB, first flew on 21 June 1961 with test pilot D. B. Cartridge at the controls; it received its certificate of airworthiness on 31 March 1962. The conversion initially cost about £105,000 per aircraft, and the 1960 price list quoted £150,000 for a Carvair newly converted from a C-54 airframe.

Twenty-one Carvairs were produced in the United Kingdom: aircraft 1, 11 and 21 at Southend Airport and the rest at Stansted. Nineteen started life as C-54s and two as civil DC-4s. The final three went to Australia's Ansett-ANA, which supplied its own DC-4s for conversion, unlike the previous 18, which Aviation Traders bought and either sold on or transferred to its associate British United Air Ferries. The last conversion, number 21, first flew on 12 July 1968. The delivery list recorded by the German Wikipedia gives Channel Air Bridge 3 aircraft in 1962, Luxembourg's Interocean Airways 2 the same year, Aer Lingus 3 in 1963–1964, Aviaco 3 in 1964–1965, British United Air Ferries 6 in 1963–1966, Ansett-ANA 3 in 1965–1968 and British Air Ferries 1 in 1969.

The Carvair entered service on 16 February 1962 with Channel Air Bridge, Laker's airline, which merged with Silver City Airways on 1 January 1963 to form British United Air Ferries (BUAF), renamed British Air Ferries (BAF) on 1 October 1967. Layouts were flexible: BAF flew its aircraft with five cars and 22 passengers or with two or three cars and 55 passengers, switching between the two in about 40 minutes; Aer Lingus's could be changed quickly between 55 seats and 22 seats plus five cars; some were pure freighters with only nine seats, and the all-passenger layout held 85, with a maximum cargo load of 19,335 lb. Beyond the Channel and Irish Sea routes, the type worked in Congo-Kinshasa in 1962–1963 under contract to the United Nations and flew for Aviaco in Spain, Compagnie Air Transport, SF Air, SOACO and Transports Aériens Réunis in France, Alisud in Italy, Tunis Air, Eastern Provincial Airways in Canada, Dominicana de Aviación, Aero Service in the Congo, Nationwide Air in New Zealand, Falcon Airways in the United States and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The aircraft earned a measure of popular fame: two British United Carvairs appear in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, as Auric Goldfinger and his bodyguard Oddjob board G-ASDC for Switzerland while the villain's Rolls-Royce Phantom is loaded through the nose; the type also features in the episode "The Chimes of Big Ben" of the 1967 series The Prisoner, and a Carvair serves as Charlie Marshall's aeroplane in John le Carré's novel The Honourable Schoolboy.

The cross-Channel car trade died in 1973, unable to compete with ever bigger, faster and cheaper sea ferries, and British Air Ferries, the last European operator, ended Carvair operations on 1 January 1977. Most of the fleet was then sold to cargo carriers around the world. Eight of the 21 airframes were destroyed in accidents: Rotterdam on 28 December 1962 (Channel Air Bridge's G-ARSF, a visual approach in snow and poor visibility that killed the captain), Karachi on 8 March 1967 (Compagnie Air Transport's F-BMHU, overweight for the take-off conditions), Twin Falls, Newfoundland, on 28 September 1968 (Eastern Provincial's CF-EPX, no casualties), Miami on 23 June 1969 (Dominicana's HI-168, smoke from two engines after take-off), Le Touquet on 18 March 1971 (BAF's G-APNH, nose gear collapse), Griffin, Georgia, on 4 April 1997 (N83FA, failure of the outer left engine on the take-off run), Venetie, Alaska, on 28 June 1997 (N103, fire in the number 2 engine and a forced landing on a sandbar in the Chandalar River) and the Nixon Fork mine airstrip, also in Alaska, on 30 May 2007 (Brooks Fuel's N898AT, carrying some 11,400 litres of petrol, which lost its right main gear and wing after touching down short of the runway).

At the end of May 2007 two remained in service: 9J-PAA, the twenty-first and last Carvair, now on display at Rand Airport in South Africa with Phoebus Apollo Aviation, and N89FA "Miss 1944", the ninth of the series and a former Ansett airframe, based at Gainesville, Texas, which in 2005 lifted more than a hundred skydivers in a single flight at the World Free Fall Convention and was still complete in April 2024, though with no evidence of recent flying. Another Ansett aircraft was abandoned at Phnom Penh in 1975. With barely more than twenty examples, the Carvair turned the veteran DC-4 into the emblem of a brief era, that of the car that travelled by air.