Design and development
In the early 1930s, fears about the safety of wooden aircraft structures drove the American aviation industry to develop all-metal airliners. United Airlines had exclusive right to the all metal twin-engine Boeing 247; their rival TWA issued a specification for an all-metal trimotor.
The Douglas response was more radical. When it flew on July 1, 1933, the prototype DC-1 had a tapered wing, retractable landing gear, and two 690 hp (515 kW) Wright radial engines driving variable-pitch propellers. It seated 12 passengers. The DC-2 was longer than the DC-1, had more powerful engines, and carried 14 passengers in a 66-inch-wide cabin.
Douglas test pilot Carl Cover flew the first test flight of the DC-2 on May 11, 1934. TWA was the first customer for the DC-2, ordering twenty. The design impressed American and European airlines, and further orders followed. Although Fokker purchased a production licence from Douglas for $100,000 (about $2,224,000 in 2022), no manufacturing was done in the Netherlands. Those for European customers, KLM, LOT, Swissair, CLS, and LAPE purchased via Fokker in the Netherlands, were built and flown by Douglas in the US, sea-shipped to Europe with wings and propellers detached, then erected at airfields by Fokker near the seaport of arrival (e.g. Cherbourg or Rotterdam). Airspeed Ltd. took a similar licence for DC-2s to be delivered in Britain and assigned the company designation Airspeed AS.23, but, although a registration for one aircraft was reserved, none were built. Another licence was taken by the Nakajima Aircraft Company in Japan; unlike Fokker and Airspeed, Nakajima built five aircraft as well as assembling at least one Douglas-built aircraft. A total of 130 civil DC-2s were built with another 62 for the United States military. In 1935, Don Douglas stated in an article that the DC-2 cost about $80,000 (about $1,780,000 in 2022) per aircraft, if mass-produced.
Operational history
Although overshadowed by its ubiquitous successor, it was the DC-2 that first showed that passenger air travel could be comfortable, safe, and reliable. As a token of this, KLM entered its first DC-2 PH-AJU Uiver (Stork) in the October 1934 MacRobertson Air Race between London and Melbourne. It finished second of the twenty entrants, behind the purpose-built de Havilland DH.88 racer Grosvenor House (race time 70 hours 54 minutes), and nearly three hours ahead of the Boeing 247D. During the total journey time of 90 hours 13 minutes, it was in the air for 81 hours 10 minutes. It won the handicap section of the race, as although the DH.88 had finished first in the handicap section, the regulations allowed the crew to claim only one victory. It flew KLM's regular 9,000-mile route (a thousand miles longer than the official race route), carrying mail, making every scheduled passenger stop, turning back once to pick up a stranded passenger, and became lost in a thunderstorm and briefly stuck in the mud after a diversionary landing at the Albury race course on the last leg of the journey.
The DC-2 was the "Good Ship Lollipop" that Shirley Temple sang about in the film Bright Eyes (1934).
A DC-2 appears in the 1937 film Lost Horizon; the footage includes taxiing, takeoff, and landing as well as views in flight.
In the 1956 film Back from Eternity, the action centers on the passengers and crew of a DC-2, registry number N39165, which makes an emergency landing in headhunter territory in the remote South American jungle. The plane, Construction Number (C/N) 1404, survives today (see #Surviving aircraft) in the color scheme of the one operated by KLM when it came second in the MacRobertson Air Race in 1934, flying a DC-2 registered in the Netherlands as PH-AJU Uiver. The real PH-AJU was lost in a crash a few months after the MacRobertson Air Race.
Author Ernest K. Gann recounts his early days as a commercial pilot flying DC-2s in his memoir Fate Is the Hunter. This includes a particularly harrowing account of flying a DC-2 with heavy ice.
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