Vintage airliners1920 to 1950

Jun 12, 2011

Vintage airliners1920 to 1950

For the first 30 years of commercial aviation, from 1920 to 1950, all airliners had propellers. Over the next ten years, to 1960,jet airliners slowly and hesitantly penetrated the extremely conservative and ultra-cautious airline industry. But by 1960 the airlines had become so polarized around the jet that efficient and successful turboprop airliners, such as the Electra and Vanguard, lost their builders a lot of money because the customers thought them obsolete. Then, again very gradually, airline managements began to realize that those who said turboprops were efficient and burned less fuel were telling the truth. As oil prices soared, so the propeller began to make a come-back. Therefore, though mainly an account of past history, this volume ends with a buoyant industry that cannot build turboprop airliners fast enough.

In this category of our blogs we will Includ it early airliners, among which are those that carried the world's very first farepaying passengers, and the first small sack of air-mail letters, long before World War 1. After that great war, aircraft were not only more capable but also more reliable; but travel by air was still not far removed from science fiction, and something totally outside the lives of all ordinary people. Those few who did buy airline tickets were advised to wear a stout leather coat, gloves and if possible goggles and a hat well tied-on.
In a space that often resembled a small box they bumped and lurched at about the same speed as an express train with hardly the slightest concession to comfort, and in noise of unbelievable intensity - until they either reached their destination, or landed to enquire the way, or landed in a precipitate and often disastrous manner because of engine failure.
Gradually new and more reliable civil engines such as the Bristol Jupiter and Wright Whirlwind put the struggling air transport industry on a slightly less shaky foundation. Though occasionally designers got carried away by their enthusiasm and made aircraft that were too large and failed to sell - examples were the Fokker
F.32 and Dornier Do X - the size and capability of airliners grew in step with the traffic.
The 1930s saw a never-to-be-repeated transformation from fabric-covered biplanes to stressed-skin monoplanes, equipped with retractable landing gear, flaps, variable-pitch propellers and many other new features.
A few of the famous aircraft in that section, notably the immortal DC-3, were still important in the 1940s, which traces the introduction of pressurization, new navigation aids and many other advances, as well as a doubling in engine power from 1000 to 2000 hp and, at the end of that decade, still more powerful engines such as the 3250 to 3500-hpPratt & Whirney Wasp Major and Wright Turbo-Compound, the latter being·an established piston engine to which were added three turbines driven by the hot exhaust gas.
These ultimate piston engines were immense mechanical accomplishments, but they could not survive in the face of competition from jets and turboprops.

The first commercial turboprop, and quite a crude engine at that (its compressor was a scaled-up Griffon pistonengine supercharger), was the Rolls-Royce Dart. This was first run in 1945, and after prolonged development and power-growth entered airline service with the outstanding Viscount in 1953. It is an extraordinary fact that in 1980 not only are hundreds of Dart-powered aircraft still in service but engines almost indistinguishablefrom the 1953 model are in large-scale production, and selling briskly to new as well as to existing customers.
But that does not mean technical development is dormant.
Today competition in the turboprop market is intense.
Rocketing oil prices have thrust propellers back into favour with the airlines; their doldrums in the 1960s and 1970s were due entirely to fashion, which thought the jet easier to sell to the travelling public.
Today most large airline constructors have studies for turboprops, including large long-haul passenger and freight aircraft for a market where the jet today has more than 99%.
Back in the 1960s airlines were often embarrassed at· turboprop equipment and tried by various means to convey the impression they operated jets. Today the picture has changed. In 1979-80 the number of completely new jet airliners launched was zero; the number of completely new turboprops four.

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