This sort of thing is why i love the internet. This morning stumbled across a mention of the Douglas Commercial 3 airliner, better known as the DC-3. The military variants are the C-47 Skytrain (US) or Dakota (UK) transport and the C-53 Skytrooper (US), a troop carrier.
That mention led to me meandering around the web and turning up some surprising facts.
A restored DC-3 Airliner, SE-CFP, operated by non-profit organisation "Flygande Veteranerna" in Sweden.
Photo credit: Towpilot / CC BY-SA
The DC-3's first flight was on December the 17th, 1935, production stopped in 1950, so the aircraft I had read about was pretty old. So how many were still flying? I imagined a handful nursed along by enthusiasts. After all, this was a work horse of the allied powers war effort, so there were quite a few made across all the variants. 607 of the DC-3 airliners, and 10,174 C-47 or C-53. Its transport role was so critical that US President Dwight D. Eisenhower is said to have cited it as one of the four most important contributions to winning the second world war. there were bound to be people keeping this history alive.
Well there are plenty of "warbirds". But the real surprise was that these aircraft are sill in use commercially and militarily all round the globe. With 172 believed to be regularly flying, the newest of which will be over 70 years old! Columbian operator Aliansa, has 16, and there are 86 on the register in the USA. They are particularly popular for cargo flights into remote rough surface airfields.
The design was so robust, and well engineered, that spare parts are still available as they were never used and there have been plenty of air-frames to cannibalise. Enabling them to keep flying reliably.
Simple flying has a great article looking at the history and current fleets, check it out.
