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About Douglas DC-4 Skymaster
Douglas DC-4 Skymaster Aircraft - photo wallpapers; Megawallpapers.org  :  The DC-4 is a four-engined airliner developed by theDouglas Aircraft Company. It served extensively during the Second World War
in a military role, and after the war for civilian airlines. The
designation DC-4 was used by Douglas Aircraft Company when developing
the DC-4E as a large, four-engined type to complement its forthcoming DC-3 design. It was intended to fulfill United Airlines'
requirement for a long-range passenger airliner. The DC-4E (E stands
for experimental) emerged as a 52-passenger airliner with a fuselage of
unusually wide cross-section for its day and a triple fin tail unit,
similar to that later used by Lockheed on its Constellation. The DC-4E first flew on June 7, 1938,
and was used by United Air Lines for test flights. But the type proved
to be ahead of its time - it was complicated to maintain and
uneconomical to operate. The sponsoring airlines, Eastern
and United, decided to ask instead for a smaller and simpler derivative
but before the definitive DC-4 could enter service the outbreak of the
Second World War meant production was channelled to the United States Army Air Forces and the type given the military designation C-54. Additional versions used by the US Navy were designated R5D. The first aircraft, a C-54, flew from Clover Field in Santa Monica, California on February 14, 1942. The DC-4 had a notable innovation in that its nose-wheel landing
gear allowed it to introduce a fuselage of constant cross-section. This
lent itself to easy stretching into the later DC-6 and DC-7.
1,163 DC-4s were built for the United States military services between
1942 and 1946. Douglas continued to develop the type during the war in
preparation for a return to airline services when peace returned.
However, the type's sales prospects were hit by the offloading of 500
wartime C...