Tail-draggers, ah!
I was privileged to participate in operating a DC-3 as a sort of human auto-pilot. The Captain just engaged me for climb, cruise and descent so that he could burn his way through a pack of 20 while sucking down a half-gallon of Navy-strength coffee.
I would have liked to fly the beast, just not for that particular operator, so that I only filled in now and then from my regular job flying modern light twins. There was no point in doing a conversion, unfortunately.
The high point was the intro, when I was taken for a wuss and told to do a full-breaking stall. I had been bleating about rules, regulations and all that sort of thing so that my boss must have been expecting me to let go at the buffet. Next thing you know we were knife-edge over the Everglades, when I thought to myself, "Is this why they invented stall breaker strips?"
At least you could not complain about the ergonomics of the cockpit, because there was none of that. Those two almost identical handles for gear and flaps back behind you, plus that stupid little gear latch. Get it wrong and you wreck the up-lock. Who would ever approve such a thing nowadays?
I had some doubts about the condition of ours, which we nicknamed the Greasy 3. That was because we used to tip 5 gallons of oil into each engine after about two hours of flight. Surely they weren't all like that?
I used to think of the DC-3 when I was flying a modern 32-seat jet, thinking of all the mechanical palaver we went through in the DC-3 to do the same amount of work.
I am not real big on nostalgia but there was one thing... I went up front to look at the cockpit of an old Caravelle once, just out of curiousity. The smell of old leather, H-5606 hydraulic fluid, sweat and a very light overtone of airsick made me think immediately of the DC-3. You knew people had been hard at work in there! New airplanes don't have anything like that, do they?