On a hot, dry day in the summer of 1933, in Winslow, Arizona, a new two-engined transport took off from one of the highest airports on the Transcontinental & Western Airways route. Gaining altitude, the pilot cut off one of its two engines, then flew more than 200 miles over the Rockies to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Returning, the pilot cut off one engine on the take-off. With one Cyclone radial roaring, the transport took off easily and climbed steadily. The first Douglas DC-1 transport had proved itself and a dream had come true.
The DC-l was an experimental model of the new Douglas two-engined luxury air transport plane. On the night of February 18, 1934, six months after the first DC-l was tested over the Rockies near Winslow, a new Cyclone-powered Douglas took off from Los Angeles for Newark, New Jersey. This plane was the first of the famous DC-2’s. It was flown by Jack Frye of TWA (Transcontinental & Western Airways) and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Air Lines. They roared into Newark ahead of a snowstorm which had blotted out all the airports along the route, and were three hours ahead of schedule for a new transcontinental record of 13 hours, 4 minutes. This flight made obsolete all existing transport planes.
SAFETY IN FLIGHT
The new Douglas DC-2 transport plane combined all the knowledge of thirty years of flight. In the early “thirties” air transport began to come into its own. Plane-to-ground radio was put into use. The radio range, or radio beam, pioneered by “Shorty” Schroeder with Henry Ford in 1927, was guiding our airliners on their course. The radio beam flashed the Morse code letters “A” and “N” along the flight path of the airliner. The dot-dash of the “A” signal was flashed on one side of the route and the dash-dot of the “N” signal was on the other. In the center of the flight path the two signals blended into a steady hum. This hum notified the pilot that he was “on course.” Regardless of fog, rain, or darkness the pilot got his course through his earphones.
The application of the gyroscope to aircraft instruments was a great step in the advancement of flying. First experimented with by Lawrence Sperry in the early days of the airplane, the constant action of the gyroscope was used to register the changes of attitude of aircraft in flight. It was first used in the Turn and Bank Indicator, then in the Gyro-Horizon and Directional Gyro. Power-driven gyros constantly whirled in the direction in which they were set. They were attached to dials on the instrument panel and to the plane itself. The position or attitude of the gyro was indicated on the dial in relation to the attitude of the airplane. As the plane changed, the constantly spinning gyro remained in its correct attitude. The gyro position and the position of the plane shown on the dial told the pilot the actual attitude of the plane in the air so that he could correct in relation to the true position indicated by the gyro. This allowed the pilot to keep his plane on a true compass course and in the proper flight attitude without having to see the horizon. Thus a pilot could fly through fog or total darkness with both ease and safety.
