Aviation Traders Carvair
Miloch wrote in
:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Traders_Carvair
The Aviation Traders ATL-98 Carvair was a large transport aircraft
powered by four radial engines. It was a Douglas DC-4-based air ferry
conversion developed by Freddie Laker's Aviation Traders (Engineering)
Limited (ATL), with a capacity generally of 22 passengers in a rear
cabin, and five cars loaded in at the front.
Design and development
Freddie Laker's idea to convert surplus examples of the Douglas DC-4
and its military counterpart the C-54 Skymaster to carry cars was a
relatively inexpensive solution to develop a successor to the rapidly
aging and increasingly inadequate Bristol 170 Freighter, the car ferry
airlines' mainstay since the late 1940s.
The Bristol Freighter's main drawback was its limited payload, in
terms of the number of cars that fitted into a single aircraft. Even
the "long-nosed" Mark 32 was able to accommodate only three cars (in
addition to 20 passengers). This made carrying cars by air a very
tricky business. If a booked car failed to turn up, the flight
instantly became unprofitable as a result of the one-third cut in
payload. This situation was made worse by the increasing average
length of British cars during the 1950s. The average UK car in 1959
was 25 centimetres (9.8 in) longer than in 1950. The extreme
seasonality of the car ferry business furthermore resulted in poor
aircraft utilization outside peak periods. Moreover, repeated takeoffs
and landings on short cross-Channel flights, in turbulent air at lower
altitudes with tight turnarounds of as little as 20 minutes, made the
aircraft prone to structural fatigue problems. These necessitated
rigorous and costly modification programmes, thereby further
increasing the type's operating costs on what were essentially
low-yield routes.
When the major airlines replaced their obsolete piston airliners with
new Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 jets on their prestige long-haul
routes, the unit price of second-hand DC-4s dropped to as little as
£50,000 (equivalent to £1.2 million today). The conversion of each of
these airframes into car-passenger carriers cost about £80,000 (£1.9
million today). This was easily affordable by smaller airlines, such
as the car ferry companies. Freddie Laker's cardboard model of a
converted DC-4 featuring a door in the nose and a flight deck raised
above the fuselage had shown that its payload was superior to the
Bristol Freighter/Superfreighter. The aircraft was designed to
accommodate five average-sized British cars plus 25 passengers as a
result of the DC-4's longer and wider fuselage. British Air Ferries
(BAF), for example, operated its Carvairs in a flexible configuration,
either accommodating five cars and 22 passengers or two-three cars and
55 passengers, permitting it to change over from one configuration to
the other in about 40 minutes. In addition, the DC-4's lack of
pressurisation made it ideal for low-altitude cross-Channel flights
that did not go high enough to require a pressurised cabin. This made
the proposed structural conversion straightforward. The result was a
new aircraft christened Carvair (derived from car-via-air).
Initially, it was thought that second-hand, pressurised Douglas DC-6
and Douglas DC-7 airframes could be converted into larger, "second
generation" Carvairs within 15 years of the original DC-4-based
Carvair's entry into service.
The conversion of the original aircraft entailed replacing the forward
fuselage with one 8 feet 8 inches (2.64 m) longer, with a raised
flightdeck in a bulbous "hump" (akin to the later Boeing 747) to allow
a sideways hinged nose door. It also entailed more powerful wheel
brakes and an enlarged tail, often thought to be a Douglas DC-7 unit,
but actually a completely new design. The engines, four Pratt &
Whitney R-2000 Twin Wasps, were unchanged.
Role
Transport
Manufacturer
Aviation Traders
First flight
21 June 1961
Introduction
16 February 1962 with Channel Air Bridge
Status
Retired from service
Number built
21 conversions
Developed from
Douglas DC-4
The Carvair was used by Aer Lingus, BUAF and BAF among others, and was
used in Congo-Kinshasa during 1960–1964, under contract to the United
Nations. Aircraft for Aer Lingus were quickly convertible between 55
seats and 22 seats with five cars. Some aircraft were pure freighters
with only nine seats. One aircraft had 55 high-density seats and room
for three cars. BAF was the last operator in Europe of the aircraft,
keeping them flying into the 1970s.
British United Carvairs made an appearance in the 1964 James Bond
movie Goldfinger as Auric Goldfinger and bodyguard Oddjob boarded
G-ASDC bound for Switzerland while Goldfinger's Rolls-Royce car was
being loaded through the Carvair nose. In the 1967 TV series The
Prisoner in the episode "The Chimes of Big Ben", the plane is seen
being loaded through the nose, then taking off and landing again.
Accidents and incidents
Of the 21 airframes, eight were destroyed in crashes:
Rotterdam, Netherlands 1962
Karachi, Pakistan 1967
Twin Falls, Canada 1968
Miami, Florida, United States 1969
Le Touquet, France 1971
Venetie, Alaska, United States 1997
Griffin, Georgia, United States 1997
McGrath, Alaska, United States 2007
The first of two catastrophic incidents occurred at Karachi on 8 March
1967 when F-BMHU of Compagnie Air Transport (the fourth produced)
suffered a double engine failure on take-off and, as a result of the
large cargo carried and the rarified atmosphere, the aircraft lost
height rapidly and the pilot was forced to make a landing on the
National Highway near the airport but struck the Drigh Road railway
bridge and several vehicles, killing four of the crew of six plus
seven others on the ground. The second catastrophic incident was near
Miami, Florida on 23 June 1969 when HI-168 of Dominicana Aviation (the
sixteenth produced), after three aborted taxi-outs due to the crew
being unhappy with engine performance, finally took off grossly
overloaded but suffered again a double engine failure and in trying to
return to the airport crashed into a main street east of the airport.
When the entire fuel load exploded and caught fire it set fire to many
buildings despite the efforts of the 14 fire trucks that attended and
took 45 minutes to quell the fire. The four crew and six on the ground
were killed, with another 12 on the ground injured.
The accident at Griffin in the United States in April 1997 involved
the fifth production Carvair which suffered catastrophic engine
failure during the takeoff run and failed to become properly airborne.
The aircraft crashed into a vacant Piggly Wiggly supermarket past the
airport perimeter, killing both pilots.
Who else remembers the most famous
Carvair, the one used by...Auric Goldfinger?
|