Wirt writes:

And I suspect that I'm old enough and had an odd enough reason to be the
only
person on this list that ever travelled on a Constellation. I would not
certainly describe the Constellation as "graceful," but my trip to Thule,
Greenland on one of them was one of the most memorable trips I've ever had.


And you would be wrong.  Whilst the Constellation were quickly replaced by
jetliners with the major airlines, especially on the major routes, the
Connies, DC-3, DC-4, DC-6s and a whole host of other piston and turboprops
carried on service with smaller airlines and on routes where the airports
would have short runways or even no concrete runways.  I have flown in DC-3s
and Connies in Canada in the 60s and 70s.  I flew in a DC-3 as late as 1974
just south of Hudson Bay.  The runway was dirt.

The Super Constellation was indeed graceful, it its day.  It was designed in
the late 1930s and first flew during WWII.

The Connie was known as the best Tri-motor or three-engine airplane as a
testament to the initial unreliability of the Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines.


Denys

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 11:07 AM
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OT: Fun Quiz

Denys writes:

> Just a correction here.
>
>  Item 42:
>  The Super Constellation was never jet propelled.  The version of the
>  Lockheed airliner to which Christian is referring is the L-1049 A through
H.
>  The H version (the last of the 1049 AKA Super Constellation) had 4 Wright
>  Cyclone R-3350-988TC18EA-2 Turbo-Compound Engines.  The R-3350 is a
twin-row
>  supercharged, air-cooled radial piston engines with 18 cylinders and a
>  displacement of 3,350 cubic inches.  This model was rated @ 3,400 HP.
These
>  engines were a later version of the Wright R-3350 Turbo Compound radial
>  engine used in the Boeing B-29 of Hiroshima fame, and were also used in
the
>  Douglas AD-1 Skyraider and the Lockheed Neptune.
>
>  The Connie and Super Connie were beautiful, graceful aircrafts, which had
a
>  short lifespan in airline service.  The definitive version of the this
>  aircraft, the L-1649 Starliner was built in 1955, just a few years before
>  the introduction of the De Havilland Comet, Boeing 707 jetliner and the
>  Douglas DC-8.  These jetliners spelled the early doom of the beautiful
>  Connie.

And I suspect that I'm old enough and had an odd enough reason to be the
only
person on this list that ever travelled on a Constellation. I would not
certainly describe the Constellation as "graceful," but my trip to Thule,
Greenland on one of them was one of the most memorable trips I've ever had.

In August of 1966, I was assigned to our satellite tracking station in
Thule,
Greenland. As was normal, the day after classes let out at the university, I
caught a standard commercial jet ride to Philadelphia, where I took a
military bus to McGuire AFB, New Jersey. Our standard departure points were
either Travis AFB, California (if you were going west) or McGuire (if you
were going east). As student scientific aides, we had to get to our
destinations and be settled in as quickly as possible in order for the
people
we were replacing could leave and get back to the university before classes
resumed for the next semester. It was a spectacular way to earn your way
through school, door-to-door satellite tracking.

I spent one night in an Air Force visiting officers' quarters and boarded a
contractor-run (Arrow Air, if I remember correctly) Constellation the next
morning. We flew to Boston and arrived there about noon in order to pick up
a
bunch of physicists from MIT. These guys were looking for magnetic monopoles
trapped in glacier ice, as physically close to the magnetic north pole as
they could get: Thule AFB.

We took off a little after 2 PM from Boston and flew north for the remainder
of day, arriving at Goose Bay, Labrador at about 10 PM, where we ate and
refueled. The Constellation was not a comfortable aircraft. It was noisy and
it vibrated like hell. It seemed impossible to mechanically synchronize four
engines so this "wa-WAH-wa-wa-WAH-WAH-wa-WAH" constantly vibrated through
the
aircraft, rattling your teeth and making sleeping impossible.

We left Goose Bay just after midnight, in pitch darkness and then flew due
north. Just an hour out of Goose Bay, the sun rose again, dead astern. That
surprised me so much that I had to think about it for a few minutes, in a
"what-the-heck-is-going" mode of thinking. But it didn't take very long for
it to dawn on me that we had just crossed the Arctic Circle and we were now
in the land of 24 hours of sunlight.

As the sun became higher and higher in the sky, we flew straight up Baffin
Bay, low and slow, only a few thousand feet off of the surface, at 180 miles
per hour, but that made for the most spectacular scenery you could ever
imagine. The shadow of the aircraft would and ripple and flicker across the
giant icebergs, some of them easily 20 or 30 miles long, as we flew over
them. The ground below was the brightest blue arctic water you could imagine
interspersed with the whitest ice imaginable.

If we had to go down, the icebergs --no matter how rugged -- were considered
our only hope. Survival time in the water was less than 2 minutes. We
arrived
in Thule about noon the next day and were told that we were the first flight
in quite a while that had made it to Thule with all four engines running.

Wirt Atmar

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