Triumph & Tragedy ~ The story of the KLM DC-2 Uiver (Part 1)

xxxEarly on December 19, 1934, the DC-2 Uiver ² (the newest airliner in the fleet of the Dutch airline, KLM) began a “speeded up” Christmas fight from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia. It was the Uiver’s first commercial flight. Less than a day later, it crashed in the Syrian Desert, killing its crew of four and its three passengers.

A KLM promotional real-photo postcard shows KLM’s brand new DC-2 airliner, named the Uiver, flying over a Dutch city.

Had the Uiver had been an ordinary aircraft, its story would have soon been forgotten: aviators and aircraft designers were constantly probing new frontiers, and airplanes regularly plunged from the sky. The Uiver, however, was not an ordinary aircraft. It was, in fact, representative of an entirely new breed of aircraft that would revolutionize air transportation. And it was famous even before it plunged from the sky into the Syrian Desert near Rutbah Wells in present-day Iraq. This is the story of the development of the DC-2, and of the Uiver’s triumph, and its tragedy.

By the 1930s, the early, experimental days of powered flight were ending. More and more passengers were beginning to fly in larger, faster airliners, which in many cases resembled luxurious ocean liners. Pilots even wore nautical-style uniforms and used the vocabulary of the sea to describe their airborne activities. Indeed, even the word pilot has its roots in seaborne shipping. ³

Real-photo postcard views of Handley Page airliners. Above left, the H.P.45 Heracles, one of eight similar aircraft flown on Imperial Airways’ airliners flown in the 1930s across Europe and into Africa and Asia.

In the 1930s, the British company Handley Page built eight large Heracles-class biplane airliners that boasted elegant interiors and safe flight: they cruised at only 100 miles per hour (161 km/h) and had a range of just 500 miles. In 10 years of service on routes in Europe and into Africa and Asia, they never suffered a fatality.

Despite the enviable safety record of the Handly Page, most early airliners were not necessarily safe, or very efficient. It was a rare aircraft that came even close to carrying enough passengers and/or cargo to make it profitable; some could barely lift their own crews and a load of fuel. Most airlines stayed in the black only because they were awarded government contracts to carry mail.

Progress in aviation has often been necessitated by tragedy, and so it was — many times — in the decades before the modern era of commercial aviation: in 1931, legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne died in the crash of a Trans-Continental & Western Airlines Fokker F10A “Super Trimotor”. The aircraft plummeted into a Kansas farm when its wing, made of wood and fabric, separated from the fuselage.

As a result of the death of Rockne, the federal government soon mandated the use of metal in the construction of new airliners. The Boeing Airplane Company of Seattle responded by developing the world’s first all-metal airliner, the B-247.

A modern postcard shows the innovative Boeing 247 airliner, the first all-metal airliner, in United Airlines livery. Because Boeing refused to sell any of the first 60 B-247s to any airline but United, a Boeing subsidiary, Transcontinental & Western Airlines went shopping for a competitive airliner.

Even before the B-247 took flight, it was clear that it would establish a new standard for commercial aviation as the fastest, highest-flying, safest, quietest airliner in the world, and the first airliner to be constructed using semi-monococque construction. ⁴

The B-247 wasn’t perfect: the passenger cabin was too cramped for comfort, its engines and two-bladed, standard propellers were inefficient, and it couldn’t carry enough passengers to make it more than moderately profitable.

Despite its deficiencies, the B-247 would put United Airlines, part of the Boeing conglomerate, far ahead of all of its competitors, including T&WA, which was dealing not only with the public relations disaster resulting from Rockne’s death, but would not be able to purchase a single B-247, at least not right away: the first 60 of the 75 new airliners that Boeing planned to build would go to United. And that, of course, put Jack Fry in a difficult position: he needed an airliner which could compete with the B-247, but no such airliner existed.

Fry approached six aircraft companies, asking for an airliner that could compete with the B-247. Only the Douglas Aircraft Company of Santa Monica, California responded, reluctantly, but soon produced plans for a revolutionary new airliner, despite doubts that it could actually do what they promised. Owner Donald Douglas essentially said to his designers, “Let’s build it and see how it works.” Fry soon signed a contract with Douglas, stipulating that the new aircraft would have three engines — then considered almost mandatory for safety ⁵ — and should be able to:

• Take off, using only one engine, from the highest airport in T&WA’s system, at Winslow, Arizona;
• Climb on one engine to 10,000 feet (3,048 metres), higher than any of the mountains of the American West;
• Carry more passengers than the B-247, at a greater speed;
• Land at only 55 mph on short runways.

First of a new breed of airliner

On July 1, 1934, slightly more than 10 months after the contract was signed, The Douglas Commercial-1, or DC-1, first took flight. While Jack Fry didn’t get exactly what he ordered, he got a lot more than he probably dreamed of. The new airliner, even at its pre-production stage, had made the B-247 obsolete.

A Douglas Aircraft Company photo shows the DC-1 on the day of its first flight, July 1, 1934. Note the narrow fillet just in front of the leading edge of the wing, between the engine and the fuselage; although they gave a slight increase in speed, they were removed in the larger production models of the aircraft, and even from the DC-1.

Fry didn’t get his three engines: Douglas engineers were confident that their DC-1 would be perfectly safe with just two. Otherwise, the new aircraft met Fry’s specifications and trumped the B-247 in other significant areas:

• Its cellular wing construction did away with internal wing struts, which in the B-247 nearly blocked the aisle. Tall passengers and crew, who would have had to stoop in the cabin of the B-247, could stand comfortably upright in the DC-1.
• Its powerful Wright Cyclone engines were made even more efficient through the use of three-bladed, variable-pitch propellers.
• The DC-1 was equipped with flaps, the first on an airliner, which T&WA called “speed brakes”. They were simple, flat panels which dropped into the aircraft slipstream, providing a 10% increase in lift and allowed landing speeds as slow as 58 mph (93 km/h).
• The DC-1 could carry more passengers and freight for longer distances than any previous aircraft. Its Wright Cyclone engines provided a cruising speed that was modestly more than that of the Boeing 247. Potentially, it was a very profitable aircraft.

Jack Fry was so impressed with the DC-1 that he immediately ordered 20 more, requesting slightly larger versions which could carry 14 rather than 12 passengers. The larger airframe would require bigger engines — again, Douglas chose Wright Cyclones, new models of which would provide even performance. A duplicate set of instruments was added for the co-pilot. These changes were significant enough to merit a new designation — the DC-2.

A T&WA postcard trumpets the “speed brakes” — primitive flaps on the trailing edge of the wing and even under the fuselage of the DC-1/DC-2 aircraft. The legend on the back of the postcard reads, All TWA Airliners are equipped with Air Brakes, located on the under side of the trailing edge of the wing, reducing landing speed to less than 58 m.p.h. with a full load and reducing the necessary landing area to one-third of that which would be necessary without these new Air Brakes. These Air Brakes represent a distinct advance in aeronautical design and give the plane a safety factor heretofore unknown in commercial transport flying. A high-resolution image of the small diagram shows how the flaps improve the landing characteristics of the DC-2.

A real-photo postcard published by KLM Airlines shows the Douglas DC-1 in flight. The aircraft, in its slightly larger, more powerful and faster descendant, the DC-2, would revolutionize civil aviation around the world. The Dutch inscription reads, “The ‘Douglas’ in the clouds.”

Albert Plesman, KLM Airlines manager at the time the DC-2 was developed, is shown on this maxicard (a postcard with a stamp on the picture side similar to the postcard’s design).

Jack Fry wasn’t alone in his admiration of the new Douglas airliner. Albert Plesman was manager and later president of the world’s oldest airline, KLM, which had pioneered air routes from Europe to Dutch colonies in Asia and the Caribbean. In the DC-2, Plesman saw the answer to his dreams of faster, more frequent passenger and freight service to those colonies as well as intermediate stops.

Plesman ordered a DC-2 — it would be named Uiver, Dutch for stork. The new airliner, in parts to be assembled in Netherlands, would soon be on its way to Netherlands on a freighter (regular trans-Atlantic flights were still in the future). The stage was set for an air race that would change the face of international aviation forever — the MacRobertson Centenary Air Race from London to Melbourne (also known as the MacRobertson International Air Race(s), the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race, the MacRobertson-Victoria Centenary-Air Race, the London Melbourne MacRobertson Race, and the MacRobertson Race, and the London to Melbourne Air Race.