CHECK SIX: The Douglas DC-7

18 MAY 1953: FIRST FLIGHT OF THE DOUGLAS DC-7

Douglas launched the DC-7 program at the prodding of C.R. Smith of American Airlines who wanted a competitor to TWA's Lockheed Super Constellations for the first transcontinental nonstop services. American's requirement even called for the same engines as the Super Constellation, the Wright R-3350 Turbo Compound (the DC-6 used the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp) radial. Douglas didn't think there was a market for such an aircraft, but Smith ordered 25 of what would become the DC-7 for $40 million which pretty much covered Douglas' development costs. To save time and make the most of the $40 million, the DC-7 was a stretched DC-6 with Wright R-3350 engines. The DC-7 was slightly faster than the Super Consellation and could under *ideal* conditions (which was rare) do a nonstop transcon in under 8 hours. 

The first variant of the DC-7 was good for transcon runs but was no better than the DC-6 for oceanic routes. That first variant went exclusively to US operators- American (34), United (57), Delta (10), and National (4). American Airlines inaugurated its own nonstop "Mercury Service" DC-7 flights between Los Angeles and New York Idlewild on 29 November 1953. As the DC-7 had a higher cruising speed than the Super Constellation, the eastbound LA-New York run was made easily in 7 hours, 15 minutes (a fact not lost upon American's marketing department, hence the name "Mercury Service"), but the westbound run from New York to LA couldn't be made within 8 hours. Despite over a dozen modifications to the DC-7s made by American's engineers which included tweaks of the Wright R-3350 radial engines to squeeze every bit of horsepower out of the engines, the DC-7s still couldn't beat the prevailing winds. American's pilot union repeatedly pointed this fact out, but C.R. Smith's influence in Washington left the issue unaddressed by federal regulators. In the following year, federal regulators adjusted the time limit to allow the flight to be made legally and American's DC-7s blocked in at 8 hours, 15 minutes on a westbound nonstop.

The next DC-7 variant was the DC-7B which had uprated engines and more fuel tanks in the engine nacelles which made oceanic crossings possible. Pan American launched its own transatlantic services in the summer of 1955 and South African Airways was finally able to fly Johannesburg-London nonstop.

The final DC-7 variant had longer wings and a stretched fuselage, the DC-7C "Seven Seas". The fuel capacity of the Seven Seas allowed full westbound nonstop transatlantic capability, something that the DC-7B couldn't routinely perform. 

There was a DC-7D which would have Rolls-Royce Tyne turboprops (same engine as the Vickers Vanguard) and a swept back vertical fin, but it never made it off the drawing board as Donald Douglas decided jets were the way to go and development of the DC-8 was given priority. 

Further reading: 

The Holy Grail of Nonstop Transcontinental Service

Scandinavian Airlines System Pioneers Polar Commercial Routes

The Cadillac of the Constellation Line

The Rise of Coach Class Air Fares

(Photos: Vintage Ad Browser, California Classic Forums)

American Automates Reservations and Ticketing, Part One: Reservisor System

C.R. Smith knew reservation systems had to keep up with jet speeds

In the early days of the airlines, the reservations and ticketing process was all done by hand at a central office with a ledger that was passed among agents who recorded reservations and erased ones that were canceled. As airlines grew in the early 1930s with the introduction of larger aircraft like the Boeing 247 and in particular, the Douglas DC-3, a single book was obviously impractical so multiple ledgers for each flight was kept in a large lazy-Susan with the reservations agents sitting all around. As they took incoming calls, they retrieved the ledger for that particular flight. The books had to be frequently reconciled so that more seats weren't sold than available and even for small airlines, this process of inventory reconciliation was time consuming on top of the fact that it had to be done multiple times through the day. Books soon gave way to large chalk boards and reservation offices had to get bigger in size to not only accommodate every larger boards to display the seat inventory for each flight, but to also accommodate the increasing numbers of personnel to keep the system running. As agents took calls, they filled out cards that were then taken clerks to the other agents who maintained the boards. Supervisors watched the boards and in the case for large airlines, they would have to use binoculars or opera glasses to view the data. A typical reservations office for a large airline might be sixty agents taking phone calls with forty additional clerks and agents who maintained the boards and conveyed data back and forth. It was a personnel intensive and time consuming process become progressively more cumbersome as airlines added more flights and larger aircraft. The first systems in place were called "Request and Reply"- agents took calls and then passed a message to "Inventory Control" who were the agents who maintained the boards. The message went back to confirm that the seat was available and reserved and a third message confirmed the reservation. So even the most rudimentary system in use needed three messages and even in those days, the airlines were the biggest users of telephone lines in the United States. In 1939, the Boston reservations office for American Airlines had determined that until a flight was 80% sold, it was possible to sell seats freely without having to get a reply from inventory control. This streamlined the process as message volumes were cut in half. When a flight was 80% full, agents in inventory control sent out a stop-sale and any further sales on those flights required confirmation from inventory control. This system was called "Sell and Report" but became "Request and Reply" for any flight over 80% booked. Despite this, the airline still had to reconcile seat inventory as well as get out ticketing information to the airports. Clerical mistakes were common and it wasn't unusual for business traveler to book two flights just in case.

Typical reservations center with status boards (this one is Pan Am's)

In 1943 a system analyst with a background in electronics and communications, Charles Amman, joined American Airlines and was tasked to find a better solution. Running the military's Air Transport Command during the war, C.R. Smith astutely saw not just a postwar boom in air travel but the arrival of faster and larger aircraft that would hopelessly encumber the manual system. Amman had determined there were three key steps in the reservations process: determine seat availability, adjust the seat inventory, and record the passenger's name. Amman met with several manufacturers of adding machines and electromechanical equipment of the day and every single one thought what American wanted was impossible- too many variables to adjust in real time was simply beyond what the technology of the day could accomplish. Amman even pared down the requirements to just the first two steps in the reservations process, determining seat availability and adjusting the seat inventory but even this was too daunting for companies he approached. Amman had C.R. Smith's support to try and come up with an in-house solution. A series of tall cylinders with each representing a flight on a given day were filled with marbles. Each marble represented an available seat. An agent would use a cash register like device to select a flight to make a reservation. This sent an electrical signal to the cylinder that represented that flight and a hatch dropped one marble out of the cylinder. If a reservation was canceled, a marble was electrically released back into the cylinder. adjusting the seat inventory automatically. Amman's machine was bulky and impractical for an airline the size of American, but it demonstrated the principles of a solution.

An early Reservisor terminal

Amman's mock up convinced the Teleregister Corporation to sign on the develop the reservations system for American. Originally a division of Western Union, Teleregister was set up in 1948 as separate company and produced the stock ticker units used by stock brokers. This gave them the experience in remote data transmission that could be applied to the American reservations project. American called the system "Reservisor" and the first pilot system was a massive room of switches, relays, and plugs called "The Brain" which was installed in the Boston reservations office in 1946. Electrical relays replaced the marbles and cylinders of Amman's mockup with the agents using a smaller device that looked like the early adding machines used by accountants. "The Brain" replied on the agent's terminal if space was available- a green light meant space was available for booking, an amber light meant the flight was sold out. A one year pilot of the Reservisor at the Boston office showed two hundred additional passengers could be booked each day with twenty less personnel. C.R. Smith, back in the executive suite after serving as head of the Air Transport Command during the war, was excited about the possibilities of expanding the Reservisor system across American's network. But the Reservisor as it was still encountered delays as it only solved the first two parts of the reservations process- determining seat availability and adjusting seat inventory. Passenger names for the tickets were still taken down by hand and there was still a stop-sale system in place as agents were responsible for manually inserting control plugs into the proper parts of "The Brain" when a flight reached 80% full. But the Reservisor as it was was a quantum leap over what American had done before and because the airline wanted accuracy and reliability, Teleregister incorporated redundancy into the Reservisor system. The challenge at that point wasn't just addressing the last step of the reservations process but to also speed up the system and increase its memory capacity as the airline not only grew but added faster aircraft like jets. Recognizing that there was a sales advantage to a faster system, Amman also wanted an upgrade to Reservisor that would allow an agent to recommend an alternate flight should a passenger's first choice of flight be booked. What he wanted was for Reservisor to be able to not just store increasing amounts of flight information, but to also be quick to allow agents to easily query the system to find out seat availability on alternate flights. He had been following developments in computer memory and settled on what was called drum memory for Reservisor. 

Magnetronic Reservisor. Note the smaller terminal and drum memory units.

The drum was a large metal cylinder coated with a ferromagnetic material and a row of fixed read-write heads along the long axis of the drum. Each read-write head had its own track on the drum. It was a precursor to the hard disk platters of today which have a moving read-write head that moves across a spinning disk. In drum memory, each track on the circumference of the drum had its own read-write head. Drum memory is what replaced the relays and switches of "The Brain" of the first version of Reservisor. The new upgraded Reservisor was called the Magnetronic Reservisor and first went into operation in 1952 at American's reservations office at New York La Guardia Airport. The system had a response time of one second and the drum unit could hold data for 1,000 flights up to 10 days in advance. Four years later, a larger unit was installed in the West Side of New York City that had a half-second response time and could store data for 2,000 flights up to 31 days in advance. Amman redesigned the West Side reservations center of American Airlines to take advantage of the new Magnetronic Reservisor with 362 agents to take phone calls, each with their own terminal. Forty additional agents were devoted just to handling reservation requests from travel agencies and large business accounts. Another 140 agents acted as liaisons between the reservations center and the other reservations offices, airport stations, and airline operations center. Forty supervisors oversaw the West Side center that averaged 4,500 phone calls a day. 

Close up of the drum memory units. The wires ran to the read-write heads.

Despite the advances of the 1956 version of the Magnetronic Reservisor, Amman worked with IBM on the last step in the reservations process, connecting passenger information with the reservation. In 1956, the Reserwriter went into operation after testing in Buffalo. The Reserwriter basically read keypunched cards that represented passenger information and then automatically sent messages via teletype to the main reservations offices. Messages could go back and forth between the two systems (albeit manually) and for the first time for the airline, agents didn't have to be in the main reservation offices to book flights. By 1958, Reserwriter terminals were in key locations across the country in American's network. Despite the success of the whole system, it still suffered with errors on account of the number of individuals still required to make the system work. Approximately 8% of reservation transactions at American were in error despite the advances in the system. Passengers who benefited the most from the Reservisor system were those flying into and out of the largest of American's destinations. The Reserwriter terminals at outlying locations helped, but because manual action was needed to move information between Reserwriter and Reservisor, it was prone to error not to mention still time consuming. For example, a round trip reservation between Buffalo and New York La Guardia required 12 people, 15 distinct steps and could take as long as three hours. Passenger growth at American meant that over an eight year period from 1950 to 1958, the number of passengers flying on American per reservations employee had dropped from 5,100 to 3,100. Simply adding employees wasn't a solution in C.R. Smith's eyes. The transaction error rate meant the airline had to undersell a flight to avoid overselling a flight during times of peak volume. American would be taking delivery of its first Boeing 707s in 1959. This meant that a transcontinental flight was faster and could move more passengers- the airline's flagship DC-7 services moved 80 passengers across the United States in 10 hours but the 707s promised to move 112 passengers across the nation in just 5 to 6 hours. Smith was worried that the new jets would overwhelm the existing system. What American needed to keep up with the jet age was reservations system that moved just as fast, preferably in real-time and with as little manual intervention as possible. Charles Amman's original reservations problem from 1953 was still an issue that lurked in the background- determine seat availability, adjust the seat inventory, and record the passenger's name. Only now, it had to be done in real time if it was to keep up with jet aircraft. 

That solution will be the subject of a future post on this blog, so stay tuned! 

Source: Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger. Times Business/Random House, 1996, pp 57-60. Waves of Change: Business Evolution Through Information Technology by James L. McKenney, Duncan C. Copeland, et all. Harvard Business Press, 1995, pp 97-106. Images: Wikipedia, American Airlines C.R. Smith Museum

American Airlines Picks the DC-10

American Airlines' involvement in the development of the Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas widebody trijets was extensive. It all goes back to when George Spater took over the reins of the airline from the legendary C.R. Smith.  In the 1960s, Spater was faced with trying to decide between the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar and the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. By some accounts, it was probably the most difficult decision Spater had to make while at the helm of American, all while living in the shadow of C.R. Smith.

Back in 1966, American's VP of development engineering, Frank Kolk, was worried about the frenzy surrounding Boeing's launch of the 747 program with order committments from Pan Am. Many airlines besides American began to wonder if they could fill 400 seats and at American, it was Kolk who sounded the alarms to C.R. Smith. "C.R., it's just too damn big for our route network!" he'd exhort every chance he got. But because American's transcontinental 707 services boasted the highest load factors in the airline's network, the 747 order was placed anyway. But, since C.R. Smith found Kolk's arguments compelling, he sent Kolk to talk with the major airframe manufacturers about a smaller widebody jet.

Boeing wasn't interested as it was immersed with the 747 and the 727/737 production lines were running at maximum capacity. The manpower just couldn't be spared. Douglas was also not interested as it had its own financial problems that would result in its merger with McDonnell the following year- the DC-8 line hadn't recouped its costs yet and the company was scrambling to pacify its DC-9 customers who were upset with production problems and delays (at one point Eastern even filed suit).

Lockheed, however was very receptive and went to work immediately on a design based on Kolk's specifications for a twin-aisle twinjet that carried 250 passengers and could operate out of New York La Guardia. But other airlines, once briefed on Lockheed's work, didn't like two engines. United, in particular, wanted four but could live with three engines. Eastern would accept no less than three engines as the overwater flight rules of the day dictated that a twin jet could not fly further than 60 minutes from a diversion airport. With many of its destinations in the Caribbean, a three or four engined jet could fly direct over the Atlantic from the Northeastern United States. As other potential customers like TWA provided their opinions, the consensus over-ruled American Airlines and the Lockheed widebody jet would be a trijet.

With Douglas financially invigorated after the merger with McDonnell, in-house studies to Kolk's initial brief would become the DC-10 to compete with what would become the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. American now faced a choice between two very similar widebody trijets. But there was a hitch- American preferred the new Rolls-Royce RB.211 engine, but the RB.211, being a more compact design thanks to its three-spool system, was too short for the DC-10 tail nacelle. As advanced as the Tristar was, Spater and the American engineering staff preferred the DC-10. Though C.R. Smith himself expressed a strong preference for the Tristar, it was Spater's call to make. Some accounts on this period in American's history point to the experience with the Lockheed Electra having biased the airline against Lockheed despite the more advanced features of the L-1011 Tristar.

Spater even talked with the head of Rolls Royce about modifying the RB.211 for the DC-10, but given that American was the only airline making the request, no guarantees could be offered to American.

There was even consensus among the various US airlines that there wasn't a sufficient market to justify two competing widebody trijet designs and there were even discussions between Spater and other airline presidents about settling on a single type. Many analysts crunching the numbers for the airlines pointed out that both aircraft being produced would eventually (and prophetically) be detrimental to the future of the commercial aircraft manufacturing at both Douglas and Lockheed. When Delta, Eastern, and TWA ordered the L-1011, the assumption was that American and United would follow suit. But United refused to accept a British engine and ordered the the DC-10 with the General Electric CF6 engine. With what was thought to be a unified front shattered by United's surprise decision to break ranks, Spater felt more comfortable and went ahead and sign a launch order for  25 DC-10s along with United Air Lines with ordered 30 aircraft. On 29 July 1971 at a joint delivery ceremony at Long Beach, the first DC-10s for United and American were handed over together.

Source: Eagle- The Story of American Airlines by Robert Serling. St. Martin's Press, 1987.

The 1938 Hurricane Relief Flights That Led to the Air Transport Command

The relief efforts following natural disasters have often reminded me of the first humanitarian airlift in the United States after a natural disaster. It was September of 1938 and one of the few Category 5 storms to strike the US mainland had just come ashore with unprecedented destructiveness in New England, causing widespread devastation throughout Long Island, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

While the forecasting technology of the day paled in comparison with what we have today, there are sufficient meteorological records from 1938 that give an impressive picture of what historians call "The Long Island Express". The storm formed off the coast of West Africa and tracked westward. Lacking offshore weather buoys, the US Weather Bureau (the National Weather Service's predecessor) relied on reports from ships at sea to track the progress of the storm. From a climatological standpoint, most hurricanes in the late part of the hurricane season that form in the Eastern Atlantic usually track to the west and curve back to the northeast, remaining out to sea and having little effect on the US East Coast.

However, on the morning of 21 September 1938 as the storm was off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, it made a sudden veer due north instead of continuing out to sea on a northeast heading. Not only did this storm head due north for New England, it also picked up speed with a storm motion of 70mph, making the "Long Island Express" one of the fastest moving hurricanes in recorded history.

The sudden change in direction caught most of New England unprepared and when the hurricane made landfall that night, wind speeds gusting to as high as 185mph were recorded along the coast of New England. The extreme forward speed of the storm made the right quadrant winds 70mph faster than they were and this put Long Island, Rhode Island, and eastern Massachusetts square in the crosshairs of this monster. A 12+ foot storm surge slammed into Providence, Rhode Island and all throughout the area, lines of communication were cut- roads, railroads, phone and telegraph lines. Not until Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992 would there be a storm that caused as much damage as "The Long Island Express". The Boston area found itself cut off from the rest of the nation as thousands were made homeless and the local infrastructure of the area was destroyed.

Enter C.R. Smith. Two years earlier Jack Frye of TWA decided the US airline industry needed a common voice to work with the government in improving air safety and efficiency. He managed to convince C.R. Smith of American, Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern, and Pat Patterson of United to form the ATA- Air Transport Association. Headed by a former military aviator of unqualified technical experience, Edgar Gorrell, one of the ATA's first acts under Gorrell was to propose that the airlines form a plan to organize their resources in the event of a national emergency to form what Gorrell called a "civil reserve air fleet".

Now keep in mind that this was a time when the airlines were run by rugged individualists like Rickenbacker or Smith. Just the fact that four disparate personalities of the magnitude of Smith, Frye, Rickenbacker, and Patterson even agreed to form the ATA was a miracle in and of itself. But to form a unified plan in case of national emergency? The other member airlines of the ATA balked at the idea despite Gorrell's pleadings- "If we don't have our own plan, the government will shove one down our throats!" But only one airline president backed the ATA proposal and that was C.R. Smith of American Airlines. The ATA proposal languished for two years until that dark night that the "Long Island Express" came ashore.

The only airline that operated on the New York-Boston route was American Airlines and C.R. Smith immediately assigned every available DC-3 the airline had to fly humanitarian missions to Boston Logan Airport which was pretty much the only functioning airport in the area in the hurricane aftermath. Flights were cancelled throughout American's system as DC-3s were pulled for the airlift. Within 24 hours, C.R. Smith realized the job couldn't be done alone- usually American carried 200 passengers a day between Boston and New York and on the first flight out of Boston, over 1000 people were looking for seats on American's mercy flights. With the local authorities also wanting to deploy medical personnel as well as rescue and construction crews to New England, American needed help.

C.R. Smith phoned Edgar Gorrell for an urgent request for help- Gorrell in turn telephoned Jack Frye at TWA, Eddie Rickenbacker at Eastern and Pat Patterson at United. Each of these airlines had the most capable airliner of the day, the DC-3, and Gorrell asked them to pull their DC-3s out of service to fly the humanitarian airlift. Without question, without argument, the three airline presidents had DC-3s streaming into Newark within hours of Gorrell's call. He then secured temporary route authority for them to fly the New York-Boston route from Washington (the nation's airlines had their route structures regulated by the federal government in those days).

For the seven days following the hurricane's landfall, the four airlines operated 24 hours a day, flying over 60,000 tons of medical supplies into Boston, carrying over 1000 rescue workers into the area, and flying out over 1500 refugees out of the area. Those numbers pale in comparison to the airlift that took place after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but keep in mind that the DC-3 only carried 21 passengers and was the state of the art in 1938. American and TWA even added their older DC-2s to the airlift. Newark, as the bridgehead of the airlift, was the scene of unprecedented cooperation by the rival airlines. American's crews often led formations of other aircraft to Boston as some of TWA and United's pilots had never flown on the East Coast. Airlines shared spare parts, even mechanics to keep the airlift running.

By the time the airlift ended and the airlines and their personnel returned to normal operations, Gorrell as well as the presidents of the four airlines realized the potential of the US airline industry to step up to the plate in times of crisis. When the first bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor just three years later, Edgar Gorrell already had a template in place to organize the US airline industry to provide airlift for the war effort- during the Second World War, the Air Transport Command (ATC) was formed by the US airline industry with government backing. And to head this massive undertaking, Edgar Gorrell turned to C.R. Smith. Not only did C.R. Smith demonstrate initiative in organizing the 1938 airlift, in 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor, C.R. Smith had already had his own experts formulating an emergency war mobilization plan involving all of the US airline industry.

On 13 December 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was prepared to sign an executive order to nationalize the US airline industry. Sitting in the Oval Office with FDR on that day were Edgar Gorrell and the chief of the US Army Air Corps, General Henry "Hap" Arnold. Both of them convinced FDR to tear up the executive order as Gorrell showed the President C.R. Smith's war plan to mobilize the airlines. In his postwar autobiography Global Mission, General Arnold noted that air power was useless without air transport.

Source: When the Airlines Went to War: The Dramatic, Never-Before-Told Story of America's Civilian Air Warriors by Robert J. Serling. Kensington Press, 1997.