Originally Posted by
Agaricus bisporus
With the reliability problems of the Connies, for instance, (engine shutdowns a weekly event)
It wasn't the Connie itself that was unreliable, but the Wright Turbo-Compound engine it used. This was never got right. Douglas made the unwise step of moving on from the DC-6 (Pratt & Whitney engines) to the DC-7 (Wright Turbo Compounds) and got all the problems of the engine too. The jets came along shortly afterwards, the older DC-6s carried on in secondary tasks all through the 1960s and beyond but the DC-7s mostly went to the breakers straight away. Some hadn't had 5 years service.
But even this was nothing compared to the initial usage of the Wright engine in WW2. The B29 was renowned for engine failures in the Pacific, it seems to have accounted for almost as many losses as enemy action. It is quite unbelievable that the atomc bomb was put onto such an unreliable aircraft, although I did read once that the Enola Gay engines had been hand-built by engineers rather than taken from the normal assembly line. Another account described a scene at Guam in 1945 where USAF maintenance had accumulated a huge mountain of unserviceable Wright engines off B29s, hundreds of them, which was about 30 feet high, they must have been using a crane to pile them up like that. I wonder what became of them (cruel cynics would say they were shipped back to the US and sold to Lockheed for the Connie
).