First, I haven't had time to read the whole thread. But I do love the DC9 very much. I didn't fly it in Australia, flew it up in the USA for the largest DC9-30 operator in the world (at the time).
Someone mentioned the chatter of the speedbreak on landing...I know what you mean...and those landings were wonderful. Often, our guys would elect to manually deploy the spoilers on landing to try to smooth out the landing...they would call it a ''hand job''.
The Flight director was a work of art...
The plane was wonderful...the heritage of Douglas was a great thing.
I flew it as copilot for ten years and upgraded to captain on the 737-200...what a terrible dissapointment in an airplane! But I think all planes would be a dissapointment to someone who loved the 9.
We called it many things...pocket rocket was one ( I saw someone else call it that here)...also the Diesel 9 and simply rocket. WE did CRWOBAR approaches...simply put, if you dropped crowbar over the airport, we could beat it to the runway! ATC loved us for doing the impossible.
AS much as i hated the 737, I loved the DC9 more. Sadly, our airline retired them.
I understand DELTA acquired about 30 DC9's from NorthWest airlines and has not found a good replacement for the type, so they keep flying.
I'm looking forward to reading the whole thread.
No one understands what a great plane this is unless you flew it! Even the paint in the cockpit was better than boeing! A soothing blue green, instead of a gray like boeing has. The radar was better, the noise level in the cockpit was so low you weren't sure the engines were running unless you checked the steam gauges.
IF I WAS SUPER RICH (bill gates rich) I would buy the rights to this plane and build them as they were originally built , not the 717, and I would sell them at a competitive price and would put the others in this class out of business.
AND THEY WOULD always have the ventral stairs and the forward stairs!!!!!!