Liners into Transports

The Nazis in Norway and Crete, the Japs at Sumatra have shown what air transports can do in modern war. In that department the U.S. Army has not been overly well supplied. Before World War II broke out, the Army laid claim to 42 Douglas transports. Since then it has been snatching planes off Douglas and Lockheed assembly lines as fast as they were built. It has also grabbed eagerly at the ships of commercial airlines; it bagged 120 of them before Pearl Harbor. Last week it added 25 urgently needed commercial planes to its stock. How many it now has in service is a military secret. But the Army has let it be known that it is operating the biggest air-freight line in the world.

The two types of transport the Army favors are military versions of the Douglas DC-4, a big four-engine job originally designed to carry 42 passengers, and the twin-engined Curtiss Condor III (C-46).

The Curtiss Condor III is the largest twin-engined military transport in the world. It has a speed of better than 200 m.p.h., can carry 50 fully equipped parachutists or an equivalent weight in light field artillery. It can fly the Atlantic with ease, as a British pilot demonstrated a few weeks ago. Fully loaded, it can make 1,500 miles nonstop. It is far superior to the Junkers 52, the transport the Nazis use most frequently, which has a range of 1,000 miles.

Hungrily awaited by the Army is the Lockheed Constellation, due early this fall. The Constellation, originally intended for a U.S.-South America run, is supposed to have a cruising speed of 250 m.p.h., a top speed of 300. With pressurized cabins, the Constellation is expected to fly comfortably at 30,000 ft. It will have many of the qualifications of a bomber, but the Army figures on sticking to strictly military types for bombing, reserving the Constellation for transport work.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.