It wasn't a bad article. But the stringer who filed it and the editor who approved it missed a bit of history that would have made the article even more poignant:
On May 11 [1947], after almost 20 days in the tundra, a Li-2 transport aircraft spotted the wreck and managed to land next to it to pick up the survivors.The Li-2 was a license-built copy of, you guessed it, the DC-3. The Soviet Union bought a production license for the DC-3 in 1936. The DC-3, as you probably know, is the big brother of the C-47 and all of its variants.
7 comments:
Typical CNN, half assed reporting... sigh...
Big brother nothing, it's the same damn airplane. Okay, maybe on has a cargo door and other doesn't. But it's the same airframe.
LRod
ZJX, ORD, ZAU retired
I think that you're expecting too much out of CNN. If you expect any "journalist" to know anything about machines, physics, chemistry or any historical event before the 2000 election you're going to be continually disappointed.
Al_in_Ottawa
Well, not exactly. The DC-3 was the queen of 1930s passenger aircraft. The C-47 was a trash-hauler with the capability for open-ocean nav.
What LRod said: it's the same airframe. The C-47 version had a cargo door and floor with tiedown fittings, plus a simple roof dome for a navigator, but all these were removable. Most of the postwar DC-3s were actually back-converted C-47s...only about 600 of the originals were built, followed by 10,000 C-47s.
Actually, the C-47 also had a reinforced floor (came with the cargo tie downs) and a shortened tail cone (for glider towing).
Editing doesn't exist anymore in a real sense.
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