Would the convair XC-99 make a profitable airliner?

Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development . With the ability to carry 400 passengers,
wouldn't this plane have ushured in the concept of mass-air travel
decades before the 747 if it had been built?

"Prowlus" wrote in message
m...
Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development . With the ability to carry 400 passengers,
wouldn't this plane have ushured in the concept of mass-air travel
decades before the 747 if it had been built?

Way too big for its era--it would have found relatively few civil airports
that could have supported its use at that time. Way too slow--the emphasis
was quickly shifting to speed, not tremendous passenger capacity, at the
time of the XC-99 development. Not to mention it would likely have been
rather uncomfortable for the passengers (internal noise for the B-36 was
pretty high, IIRC, due to those six massive recip engines). So in summation,
you'd have had an aircraft that could only be operated from a handful of
airports at the time, would have subjected its passengers to significant
discomfort, and would have kept them in that condition for a longer period
of flight than competing aircraft--not a good business proposition, IMO.

Brooks

"Prowlus" wrote in message
m...
Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development . With the ability to carry 400 passengers,
wouldn't this plane have ushured in the concept of mass-air travel
decades before the 747 if it had been built?


Convair actually proposed an airliner version (Type 37).

It was rated to carry 204 pax rather than 400, the military
packed em in rather tight. The civil version would have
been a turboprop.

http://www.air-and-space.com/xc99.htm

Keith





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In article ,
(Prowlus) writes:
Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development . With the ability to carry 400 passengers,
wouldn't this plane have ushured in the concept of mass-air travel
decades before the 747 if it had been built?

They did. Pan Am ordered 15 Convair Model 37s, the commercial flavor
of the C-99, in February, 1945. The expected payload was about 200
passengers adn 15,000# of baggage & mail. Things didn't work out
quite the way they expected though - After the war ended, there
weren't enough people travelling to fill a 200-seat airplane, and the
U.S. government made surplaus C-54s (DC-4s) available for bargain
prices.

Given the history of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, (The airliner
version of the B-29/B-50/C-97), I wonder if the Model 37 could have
been flown at a profit even if there were a travel boom. The Strats
were more complex than the DC-4 and Constellations they were competing
with, and the 28 cylinder R4360s they were powered by - the same basic
engine used in the C-99 - was pretty troublesome in commercial
service. The B.377 wasn't commercially viable, even though its
performance was substantially higher than the DC-4 or early Connie.

IIRC, at some point, Douglas proposed a passenger version of the C-74
(The single-story predecessor to the C-124) to fill the same niche (It
was, I believe, designated DC-7 for a short time, before the DC-7
designation was used for the stretched DC-6), with the same results.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

On 10 Sep 2004 07:05:45 -0700, (Prowlus) wrote:

Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development

They did indeed, with beds and piano bars and everything. Pan Am even
put down a deposit on 15 of them, with 204 seats, sleeping berths,
lounges, and "Henry Dreyfuss interiors."

But the Boeing 707 put paid to all that.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put Cubdriver in subject line)

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