--=======96A2EF7======= Content-Type: text/plain; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-7D7A4D62; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Gerry wrote (in part) >Which post-war 4-engine went into revenue service first, Stratocruiser, DC6 >or Connie? For some reason I can't recall, I preferred the Connie to the >DC6. I think it may have been quieter, or maybe the engines didn't glow as >brightly. Never rode in or even saw the Boeing. I have a TWA timetable of April 1 1941, which lists daily New York-Los Angeles Boeing Stratoliner flights with three intermediate stops at Chicago, Kansas City and Albuquerque. The service was inaugurated July 8 1940, cutting the time to less than 14 hours, according to R.E.G. Davies TWA book. Pan Am was the only other operator to start (I just mis-spelled that as Strat!) before the US entered WWII - I believe they flew NYC to Rio, with stops, before being taken over by the military. When they re-entered scheduled TWA service after the war, they were flying without the pressurisation equipment, deleted to save weight for Atlantic crossings, I think. Pan Am's appear to have been sold to the French: somewhere I have a postwar timetable for Aigle Azur,a French carrier that used them for a period: they were also flown in Indo-china by the UN Control Commission around the fifties, I think. Lockheed Constellations were built to TWA's pre-war specifications, but the airline did not get the use of them until early 1946, and their introduction to Transatlantic service was by Pan Am on January 14th 1946. TWA's services started in February 1946. Other early carriers included AOA , BOAC and KLM on worldwide routes and Eastern within the USA. DC4s had become (under various military designations) the mainstay of long-distance transport by the end of the war, and despite the ready availability of conversions, Douglas still sold several hundred new DC-4s to airlines worldwide. It suffered though by comparison with the Constellation, and it was not long before the DC-6 with equivalent speed at pressurisation went into production. A United schedule of July 1 1947 shows DC-6 flights (which at the time they called Mainliner 300), American may have started earlier, but I don't have a relevant schedule from the period. Boeing Stratocruisers went into service with Pan Am on the Hawaii route on April 1 1949, and very soon afterwards on the Atlantic and elsewhere. AOA and BOAC also operated B377s on the Atlantic, United mainly on the West Coast-Hawaii route, and NWA transcontinentally and to the Orient. Douglas and Lockheed progressively updated their models until the jets came on the scene in the late '50s. Robin Johnson --=======96A2EF7======= Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-avg=cert; x-avg-checked=avg-ok-7D7A4D62 Content-Disposition: inline --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.456 / Virus Database: 256 - Release Date: 2/18/2003 --=======96A2EF7=======--