Just saw over at ****** (I removed the commercial link) that as of this past June (2004) P.K. Wrigley's beautiful DC-3 went on the sale block. I was aboard this aircraft back in the '70's where it was hangared on Catalina Island. Only about 34 hundred hours on it since modified from a C-47 to a DC-3. Probably the best kept DC-3 in the world. Oh, for those of you too young to know, Mr. Wrigley was the man who made chewing gum popular.
That is her Steve, would you please PM me the link. I would greatly appreciate it, thank you.
On the maintenance side, according to the aircraft log books the engines were changed every 500 hours. Also, on a couple of occasions we borrowed a DC-3 from another owner and had some paired flights, not what you would call formation flights, and our DC-3 would run off and leave the other one with both aircraft at the same power settings.
By the way, the primary flight instruments were Collins FD-102 flight directors.
Now a funny story about one of my first training flights in the aircraft. When the instrument panel was modified the flap position indicator was relocated to where it was vertical on the left side of the cockpit by the pilot's left leg. Now the interesting thing was that when the flaps were retracted the pointer was at the bottom of the indicator (down) and when the flaps were full down the pointer was at the top of the indicator (up).
Being the dutiful trainee pilot I performed a pre-exterior cockpit check, which required lower the flaps to full down for a visual inspection. After I completed the exterior pre-flight I met the IP in the cockpit and we started the pre-start checklist. When he read off "Flap handle neutral" I looked at the flap indicator, saw the pointer at the top (up, which really meant full down) and replied "Flaps up".
I think you all can figured out the rest. We taxied, lined up on the runway, I applied takeoff power and the tail came up immediately. I had to really pull hard to get airborne, added a bunch of up trim and we slowly climbed out. Very slowly climbed out. We were not climbing very fast, the airspeed was around 90 some knots and the cylinder head temps were going up rapidly. I only flown the DC-3 a couple of times earlier, but knew this could not be correct.
I kept looking around trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. Looked at the flap positron indicator and it hit me. Oh My God! The flaps were full down. I reached over, grabbed the flap handle and pulled it up. That old DC-3 jumped like I had fired off JATO bottles. The airspeed shot up, rate of climb doubled and the temps went way down.
The IP looked at me and said, "Well, we seemed to have learned something here haven't we."
Never made that mistake again.
(Thank God we didn't lose an engine.
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