There were open cockpit passenger planes.
Kept the PAX comfortable. Kept the pilot awake.
From the accompanying email (thanks, Wilko):
The airplane is in Spokane , WA , and is the oldest flying Boeing Aircraft.
After 8 years of repair and rebuilding and 8,000 hours of toil the Boeing 40C rolled out last winter as a finished airplane. They had to wait a few weeks for the snow to melt to fly this baby. They received their Standard Airworthiness Certificate from the FAA and completed the engine pre-oil and fuel flow tests for the first of the taxi tests.
Facts for the Boeing 40 project:
221 gallons of dope/reducer and 120 yards of 102 ceconite fabric. 12 gallons of polyurethane paint for the sheet metal. The wings have 33,000 individual parts in them. The airplane weighs 4080 lbs empty, has a gross weight of 6075 lbs. It is 34 ft long and 13 feet tall with a wing span of 44 feet.
Wing loading is 10 lbs per sq ft and power loading is 10 Pounds per HP. It should cruise at 115 mph using 28 GPH, and 32 GPH at 120 mph. It carries 120 gallons of fuel in three tanks.
350 – 2 inch brushes were used to apply 6 gallons of West Systems epoxy, and 181 rolls of paper towels for cleanup.
There were a total of 62 volunteers who worked on the project to some degree. 21 of the volunteers did a significant amount of work, and 9 of the volunteers worked continuously during the 8 year project.
Yes, we have no Guinness
I would ridicule them for using Ceconite (Dacron) instead of Cotton, but Cotton isn’t available for air skins anymore.
Looks nice in the pics. It is nice to see the old ones restored to flyable condition.
Kept the pilot awake. Also made him deaf, eventually.
Absolutely beautiful. Wonder if the OEM pilot seat was leather as well. Great work in the cockpit. Like the phone in the cockpit for ordering in flight drinks and such.
I wondered about the OEM seats too since I was fortunate to take a ride in a Ford Tri Motor not long ago. The seats were made of wicker and bolted to the floor.
No idea who the people could talk to on the phone. The pilot of an open cockpit-radial engine plane??
You can see it fly, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zag8Wwjz0bc
“You could mail a letter in 1925 in New York, and it would arrive in San Francisco in two days, about 98% of the time…”
Note the exhausts run aft of the cockpit and passenger cabin, and are pointed downward at the tips. Anybody who’s ever driven a musclecar with dual exhaust and glasspacks knows they’re not quiet, by any means, but it’s possible to hold a conversation in them.
Normally radials end the exhaust just aft of the engine cowling, the pipe being just so much extra weight the designer would like to be rid of.
– Max