Aramco's 3 DC-4s -- What happened to them?

[ConnieLover]

Was wondering this recently, and was not able to find any info about their eventual fates anywhere on the web, and Saudi Aramco apparently does not maintain any kind of archive, from what I found on the web.

I flew in one of them a few times long ago, and am wondering what happened to them: the Camel, the Gazelle, and the Oryx.

Thanks in advance for any info anyone can provide.

[DaveReidUK]

I don't know anything about the DC-4s, but Aramco's DC-6B N708A "The Flying Camel" subsequently went to Transair Sweden and was the aircraft that crashed in Africa in September 1961, killing UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

[ConnieLover]

Oh, my..... I did not know that that plane that crashed had been an Aramco plane. What a tragic event for the world.

And Aramco Services has no archives, either.

These DC-4s were used at lest as early as 1950, and possibly earlier, for Aramco's New York-Europe-Arabia flights for company personnel and for their dependents.

[ConnieLover]

button push ignored --
Thanks for the info. I'm pretty sure they all have been scrapped.

I do wish someone had a history of each of them -- or at least of the Camel.

[WHBM]

Aramco had 2 DC4s, replaced by 3 DC6s, so I wonder if your recollection of a trio is the latter (also given the comment above).


DC4 10456. N711A. Ex American AL 1947, their only secondhand one. Sold 1956, to ONA, thence Air Algerie and in Cambodia, where it was lost in the 1970s war.

DC4 43094. N1625. New 1947. Sold 1952 to California Eastern, then to Korean Air Lines 1953-67, who finally scrapped it.

DC6B 43559. N708A. New 1952. Sold 1961 to Transair Sweden, with whom it crashed within days at Ndola N Rhodesia, killing Dag Hammerskjold among others.

DC6B 43560. N709A. Also new 1952 and sold 1961 to Transair Sweden, and other European operators, ending up in Peru, scrapped late 1970s.

DC6A 45059. N710A. New 1956. Sold 1960 to Lacsa and on to various others around Latin America. Scrapped 1990.

The complete DC4-6-7 detail is here in a downloadable spreadsheet, just search for "Aramco".

http://www.planelist.net/dc-4.zip


Someone will be along soon I'm sure to relate the bland tail numbers to the aircraft names.

[tonytales]

When I started at LASI at KIDL in 1954, one of our customers was Aramco. I must say, their DC-4 and DC-6 were the most immaculately maintained aircraft, almost equal to the US SAMFLEET planes. They pulled out not long after I started.
The one outstanding feature I remember on the DC-4 were the aft toilets. No tanks to catch waste. Simply a stainless steel tube leading directly overboard. On the lavatory doors were instructions not to use the toilet over populated land. Best toilet system I ever saw and the easiest to maintain. .

[ConnieLover]

WHBM --
Thank you very much! .I did not know about "planelist.com". (Obviously!) I am wrong about there being 3 DC-4s, but I know I flew in one of Aramco's DC-4s at least once or twice before any of Aramco's DC-6s were built.

This site is great -- 3 replies in less than 5 hours to a question I was pretty sure was very difficult to answer. Amazing..... Thank you, each of you. Looking forward to seeing names attached to the tail numbers of those two DC-4s.

(The "Camel" was the only plane that I remember being named in the old company newsletters I read on line some years ago.)

[ConnieLover]

tonytales --
Your comment about Aramco's superb maintenance of their aircraft squares with my family's memories of how finicky Aramco was about maintaining their airplanes. Nice to have that confirmed. And what you wrote about the aft toilets in the DC-4s is soooo funny!

I remember being told long ago that DC-4s were not pressurized. Is that true? If not, how could they have had what Wikipedia claims is a service ceiling of 22,300 feet without everyone on board needing oxygen? And -- if DC-4s were, indeed, pressurized, how did their aft toilet flush without depressurizing the airplane?

[DaveReidUK]

Someone will be along soon I'm sure to relate the bland tail numbers to the aircraft names.

Again, can't speak for the DC-4s, but the DC-6s were:

N708A "The Flying Camel"
N709A "The Flying Gazelle"
N710A "The Flying Oryx"

[Airbubba]

Here's some background on the DC-4's from a 1967 article in the Aramco World magazine:

In July 1956, a national U.S. magazine published a two-page map charting all air traffic over the North Atlantic at midnight on a random spring night. It showed that there were 110 aircraft: military planes, 70 commercial flights representing 18 airlines and, just about halfway to Europe, a lone DC-6B owned by a somewhat unusual airline—the Arabian American Oil Company.

It probably seems odd today to think that an oil company operating exclusive in a country as far away as Saudi Arabi would ever have operated an international airline. But 20 years ago when that airline was organized, commercial air service into and out of the Middle East was no[t] what it is today. It certainly wasn't sufficient to meet the pressing needs of a company engaged in the enormous postwar development of some of the world's biggest oil fields. So it was that on an April day in 1947 an Aramco pilot gunned a DC-4 Skymaster, the "Flying Camel," down a runway on Roosevelt Field, Long Island and headed for the Azores on the first leg of a 7,000-mile trip that after stops in Lisbon, Rome and Beirut, would end on the sandy shore of the Arabian Gulf.

Many Aramco veterans consider the late 40's and the 50's as the golden years of the company's Aviation Department—and with some reason. Before widespread commercial jet service finally eliminated the need for Aramco's own transatlantic flights—which ended on January 1, 1961—the "Camel" and her two younger sisters, the "Gazelle" and the "Oryx," had grown to DC-6B's and the company had logged a remarkable record. It had flown 17,200,000 miles with 87,600 international passengers and 7,300,000 pounds of cargo, made 2,400 Atlantic crossings and completed a satisfying 13 ½ years of scheduled international service without a single fatality or injury.

Saudi Aramco World : Fly The Desert Sky (http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/196706/fly.the.desert.sky.htm)

A couple of pictures of the Flying Camel DC-4 here:

Dhahran International Airport, Saudi Arabia (http://www.the-saudi.net/dia/old-dhahran/index.html)

[DaveReidUK]

A couple of pictures of the Flying Camel DC-4 here:

Dhahran International Airport, Saudi Arabia (http://www.the-saudi.net/dia/old-dhahran/index.html)

The exterior shots are of the successor "Flying Camel" DC-6 (delivered July 1952). Thie interior, dated 1947, will be the DC-4.

[WHBM]

I remember being told long ago that DC-4s were not pressurized. Is that true? If not, how could they have had what Wikipedia claims is a service ceiling of 22,300 feet without everyone on board needing oxygen? And -- if DC-4s were, indeed, pressurized, how did their aft toilet flush without depressurizing the airplane?
That is correct. Do not confuse service ceiling, which is an aeroengineering aspect of the aircraft design, with whether crew and/or passengers require oxygen (where 12,000 feet is a common upper limit). A WW2 Spitfire, unpressurised, had a service ceiling up to 34,000 feet, with the pilot obviously on oxygen.

The DC4 thus thundered across the Atlantic at about 10,000 feet. The DC6, pressurised, more powerful, a bit longer, higher fuel capacity and take-off weight, etc, flew at about double that. A DC4 from New York to Dhahran must have been quite a story to tell about.

Basic identification differences include that the DC4 has round cabin windows, where the DC6 has square ones. Both had three-bladed props, where the DC7, a further advance, has four-bladed ones. Beyond that you need to be a bit of an aficionado to spot the Douglas differences, and the various submodels identified by a letter suffix.

Aramco never had the DC7 so we needn't cover here that if a Douglas is coming in with one prop feathered and engine oil-strewn, it's most likely a DC7 ...

[tonytales]

Connie Lover
I remember being told long ago that DC-4s were not pressurized. Is that true? If not, how could they have had what Wikipedia claims is a service ceiling of 22,300 feet without everyone on board needing oxygen? And -- if DC-4s were, indeed, pressurized, how did their aft toilet flush without depressurizing the airplane?
The original DC-4E (one off) of the 1930'2 had pressurization. Production C-54/DC-4 built in the US were not pressurized. Canadair bought license rights and produced the DC-4M North Star (Argonaut) fitted with Merlin engines and did pressurize them
CINTA, a Chilean airline, briefly operated DC-4 to New York where I serviced them.
For trans-Andean flying they had fitted a passenger oxygen system; the flight crew of course had one. The pax system consisted of industrial Aviator's Breathing Oxygen tanks on the front bulkhead and metal tubing running down left and right the sidewalls above the windows. A each seat row there were taps with valves and a length of flexible plastic tubing. When needed you uncoiled the flex tubing and put the end in you mouth and turned on your valve and sucked oxygen. CINTA, unlike most R-2000 engine users naturally maintained the two speed supercharger. Most utfits had locked them in low due to sludging problems with the clutch.
Another customer of ours, flying freight on DC-4 trans-Atlantic rewarded crews for low fuel use. This led to some adventurous crews going on oxygen, going high and then manually leaning mixtures past Auto-Lean. Unfortunately it put them into the high combustion temperatures and there were a lot of valve problems. They ended locking the superchargers in low and accepted a little more fuel usage.
So yes, the DC-4 was unpressurized but could get up there to where you needed oxygen. Pardon thread drift off ARAMCO.

[treadigraph]

I saw three aircraft land with an engine out at Miami one afternoon... a Trislander (lost one on take off and landed straight ahead, plenty of room), an Electra and, yes, a DC-7!

[ConnieLover]

WHBM, tonytales, treadigraph, and buttonpushignored --
Thank you very much, each of you, for the fascinating and very interesting replies! No worries about thread drift -- I LOVE learning new things! So sorry I did not reply to your kind posts sooner; been doing other things today, and this is the first time I got around to checking PPRuNe today.

And it pleases me no end that my old memory was correct about DC-4s not being pressurized. I have been fond of saying, "Them suckers weren't pressurized!" about the Aramco DC-4s I flew in as a child -- and I was right! (I knew that an aircraft's service ceiling is not her normal cruise altitude, but I was not able to find the DC-4's normal cruise altitude. 10,000 feet sounds quite reasonable.

My first flight on an Aramco DC-4 was in 1950, from New York (Idlewild) to Gander, Newfoundland (where we stopped for several hours that night because the plane had some kind of problem, and I remember the terminal building was a large Quonset hut, and I ran around the terminal with my sister, and enjoyed that a lot) to Prestwick, Scotland, then to Rome, then to Beirut, then to Dhahran.

Yes, it was quite an adventure! I never got bored during that long trip, which took 3 days, because there was always something to do: look out the window at the clouds and when over land, look at the teeny tiny buildings and roads, and read, and other stuff. Didn't need any IFE - we made out won entertainment. And, anyways, none of the segments were that long, unlike today, where technology has enabled flights that are often 10+ hours long.

IK'm so fortunate to have gotten to travel back then. I reallhy enjoyed that.

[WHBM]

I understand that Beirut in those times filled the role rather taken by Dubai nowadays, for being the commercial and aviation centre right across the Middle East. Among other things, I have read of it having Western-standard boarding schools which children of expats attended as a closer option than being sent all the way back home. Aramco seem to have done a lot of work between Saudi and Beirut. They bought some new Fokker F-27s in the mid-1960s for this work. Although a US company, and the aircraft were US-registered, the geographical division between Fokker and Fairchild for where they each marketed the F-27 meant they had to be Fokkers and not US-built Fairchilds.

Colleague at the office had a father who was a Kuwait Airways Comet flight engineer. Notably, in these earlier times the Kuwaiti ops and maintenance centre was not in Kuwait itself but in Beirut, which is where they lived. Almost wholly an expat/ex-RAF operation. Flights would route from London via other European points, through Beirut and Kuwait, thence to Pakistan and India. One crew from London to Beirut, a second took over there through to Bombay. If required, an otherwise through Kuwaiti flight might have an aircraft change at Beirut.

[broadreach]

Off thread but germane to oxygen on DC-4s, I remember so well shuttling across the Andes between Lima (school) and Iquitos (parents) in Peru in the late fifties. Oxygen via flexible tubes and plastic tips chewed on by thousands before us. Lima-Iquitos would usually take longer than vice versa due to the need to circle for altitude north of Lima before heading through the Cordillera Blanca.

[ConnieLover]

WHBM and broadreach --
Thanks for the very interesting replies! I really enjoy stories of "the old days".

We never had to use oxygen back then, in any of the planes I flew in. I would have remembered that.

What adventures we all had back then!

[WHBM]

What adventures we all had back then!
Yes. Also hugely expensive, well out of reach of the common man not on business expenses. And with an accident and fatality rate up at 100 times (no joke), or more, what it is now.

[Cubs2jets]

tonytales --
I remember being told long ago that DC-4s were not pressurized. Is that true? If not, how could they have had what Wikipedia claims is a service ceiling of 22,300 feet without everyone on board needing oxygen? And -- if DC-4s were, indeed, pressurized, how did their aft toilet flush without depressurizing the airplane?

"Service ceiling" means the maximum altitude at which the aircraft can maintain a 50 foot per minute rate of climb with full available power.

Has nothing to do with the ability of crew/pax to survive. Other regulations cover availability of oxygen above a certain altitude.

C2j

[ConnieLover]

WHBM --
I am very glad I was a kid and not an adult back then, and did not know the frightening facts about how dangerous flying was back then. I only learned that fairly recently. Heck, I remember seeing flames coming out of the back of one of the engines at night, every once in a while, and thinking noting of it because it seemed so normal! No big deal -- or so I thought back then. That makes Aramco's perfect record with their aircraft all the more astounding. Finicky and picky to the N th degree -- and that worked! (Boy, am I glad it did!)

Cubs2jets --
Thank you very much for the definition of what an aircraft's Service Ceiling is. I knew it was not anywhere close to the normal cruise altitude, but I didn't know the definition, nor did I know the DC-4's normal cruise altitude.

Love this discussion and these threads on aviation history!

[WHBM]

WHBM --
I am very glad I was a kid and not an adult back then, and did not know the frightening facts about how dangerous flying was back then. I only learned that fairly recently. Heck, I remember seeing flames coming out of the back of one of the engines at night, every once in a while, and thinking noting of it because it seemed so normal! No big deal -- or so I thought back then. That makes Aramco's perfect record with their aircraft all the more astounding. Finicky and picky to the N th degree -- and that worked! (Boy, am I glad it did!)
Interestingly, I can't recall a single accident which was caused by flames venting back from a piston aircraft in flight.

From the US, their handful of major international carriers (bearing in mind that the vast majority of US aviation is domestic within the country) do seem to have had a worse record than average. Pan Am in particular; the number of their aircraft that crashed into the Pacific Ocean alone, let alone all their other serious events worldwide, must have caused concerns.

[tonytales]

The Wright 3350 TC18 engines on the DC-7 and L-1049 had the most impressive exhaust flames as the Power Recovery Turbines introduced some fresh air (cooling the disk) right inside the flight hood. My company maintained some US Navy R7V Super Connies along with the radar Connies. One of R7V was the first to be fitted with the TC (Turbo Compound) engine. The nacelle had the usual flame shields aft of the exhaust of the flight hood. On this one aircraft the flame shields for the top PRT extended past the QEC parting line where they normally terminated. Instead, they went all the way back to the wing leading edge and wrapped around it for a distance aft. Apparently it had been used in flight testing the TC installation. I was told Wright had quite a time reducing the exhaust flame particularly at take-off where the mixture was in full rich. It was the only Connie I saw with the extra flame shields.