Originally Posted by
Chris Scott
Quote:
I have this lovely advertisment from the 50's, with a Douglas DC7C circling the globe... How many engine changes did it have on the way round?
The 6B, for me, was the apogee.
OK, Douglas aficionados, why did Douglas move on from the DC6B, engines as reliable as you could get then, to the DC7, whose engines were a step backwards in reliability.
The Wright engines were well known by this time for failure problems that were never cracked. DC6 operators would laugh at Constellation operators for their reliability record. The best demonstration is what happened just a few years later when the jets came along. DC6Bs were by and large sold on to secondary operators; DC7s went to the scrapyard, unsellable after just a few years.