Our industry has a number of icons, aircraft that have turned out so good and have made such an impact that they leave their imprint on the skies forever. The DC-3 is certainly such an aircraft and it has not lost its aura of excellence since its first flight on 17 December 1935. As she flew through the sky of Southern California few if any on board or on the ground realized that it was the first day of a new era in aviation history. The DC-3 went on to become a legend and it is still with us as a faithful workhorse in many parts of the world.
My very first flight, at age 8 was in a Li-2, the version of the DC-3 built in the Soviet Union. MALEV, the Hungarian airline had a fleet of Li-2s and a single DC-3 and on week-ends these were put to work to carry sightseers over Budapest. My Dad who knew how fascinated I was by airplanes bought two of the not so cheap tickets and took me for a ride. It was wonderful! A year later he again got a pair of tickets and this time I went with my cousin who was a few years older than me. This time the ride was a disaster.
For some reason (which I discovered only years later) the pilots flew like a runaway rollercoaster and while their antics were probably attractive to the girls on board, for me it was nothing but a frightening 20 minutes at the end of which I was really happy to feel terra firma under my feet again.
Climbing and then descending steeply at low level was not my kind of fun. That it was not the safest way to fly either was demonstrated a year later when, on 8 June 1961 HA-TSA, MALEV’s sole DC-3 crashed into a house while on a sightseeing flight, killing all 27 souls on board. They apparently pulled up just a tad too late… I have been wondering ever since: was there also a kid, with frightened eyes and biting his lips, on that fateful flight too?
That accident served up a frightening experience also to the tower controller handling the flight. After they took off, the controller noticed he longish silence and missing a report from the pilots, he grabbed his mike and enquired: HA-TSA are you still alive? The aircraft had crashed just a few minutes earlier… When those words were discovered during the investigation, agents of State Security were convinced that the guy had something to do with what had happened and gave him a very hard time before he was able to clear his name…
I am sure there are many people out there who have their own stories about the DC-3… one day we should write them all up and share with the world. This is the least we could do to honor the 75 years of DC-3 flight.
