Poll: Which was the best WWII transport?

Favorite WWII transport?

  • Total voters
    58

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pbehn said:
It surprises me how so many transports prior to the DC3 were so obviously unaerodynamic. Transports are slow in aviation terms but 150-200MPH is fast for a car and you never see high performance cars looking like a house brick.
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Sometimes the thought process is that a transport is just a "pick up truck." Why make it fast or aerodynamic when all it had to do is haul stuff?
 
Transport aircraft in the 1920s/1930s were competing with ships, trains (mostly coal fired steam engines) and low powered trucks on poor road systems. It was only from the mid 30s on that air-transport speed really became an economic factor. Lockheed Vegas, Orions and He 70s not withstanding. They depended on air mail subsidies or advertising write-offs to actually "make money".
Even the Boeing 247 couldn't make money on passenger tickets alone.

First flight Feb 8th 1933 which really shows how out of date the Ju 52 really was.
"Air Freight" often consisted of such things as flying fresh flowers from California to New York. Not a real heavy load and something that was just about impractical using 3-5 day ground transport. Flying heavier things (like fruit) probably would have been out of the question.
 
FLYBOYJ said:
You're correct but some designers didn't care about that. Ease of construction, ease of operation, lifting capacity, cost effectiveness and range seemed to be the thinking
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That is what surprises me, when moving a lot of cargo the quickr you get there the better.
 
You also have to remember that airfields, even at major cities, were best described as tiny.
The Boeing 247 pictured above had a stalling/landing speed of 58mph (old books sometimes bounce back and forth on terms) and a take off run of 790ft at sea level.
Fastest, most economical plane in the world isn't much good if it can only use a few airports. One reason there were so many flying boats, in effect unlimited runway length.
 
True, however I just came across this.
https://content.historicengland.org...concrete/nine-thousand-miles-of-concrete.pdf/

The construction of runways in UK was probably the biggest "civil" engineering project that we have ever undertaken.
 
actually the major air transport operations since 1945 were dominated by the side loading transports mostly the C-47s. Operations that come to mind include the berlin airlift, the French operations at dien bien Phu, most of the early operations in Vietnam.

I'm not saying that rear loading air transports don't have advantages, clearly they do. But there re other issues most notably range, payload and reliability. there are other more important factors to consider. for tactical transport a/c, more important issues are the STOL and rough strip handling capabilities where a/c like the caribou really set the standard, for long range strategic airlift the roll on roll off capabilities are significant, but more significant are range, payload, reliability issues.

The Germans mounted some very successful sir transport operations, most notably crete and Norway. Less successful were the operations over Holland and an outright failure at Stalingrad. they never had the numbers to make a difference after that.

in none of these operations, and certainly none of the allied operations either during the war, or even after the war until about 1965 or so, are socalled modern tansports of any consequence. Of far greater singnificance was the survivability reliability and range of the transport fleet.

We don't have any operations to measure the AR232 by, but the me 323 was not a success in its one big deployment, the air bridge to Nth Africa, where its lack of performance made it particularly vulnerable. if the germans had been equipped with a more highly performing transport like the c-47, it is an open question whether they may have had more success.

in answer to the question of who adopted the c-47 or Ju-52 in the design of new military transports, the answer is nobody, but then again, c-47s remained the dominant military transport cross the world until the 1960's. no changes were needed to this design and it was not really displaced from its dominant position for over 20 years
 
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For the vast majority of nations after WW II there was just no money for new transport aircraft. Just getting good combat aircraft sucked up the budget. And many nations had no real need for heavy lift aircraft with roll-on/roll-off capability (Switzerland needed to air lift trucks from the French border to the Italian border?)
Surplus C-47s and C-46s were available for dimes on the dollar (around 10%) of the price of even new versions of these aircraft let alone new designs, and the US may have simply given a number away to allies at the beginning of the Cold war as the US reequipped with newer aircraft.
The old tail draggers were more aerodynamic than many of the "modern" transports with raised tails and loading ramps and used less fuel per mile. When transporting personnel and small items this was also a consideration.
Transports also got to the point where the idea of using them in "hot" zones was really too expensive and wasteful for most nations to really deal with. The idea sounds good for airborne forces but as the Germans found out (and some people seemed to forget) the loss of aircraft landing in hot zones was extremely high (the German transport fleet never really recovered from Norway and the low countries).
Tanks driving down aircraft ramps with guns blazing looks cool on magazine covers but if there is anything for the tank to actually hit it is shooting the crap out of the transport aircraft with what ever rounds are missing the tank.
Most nations had transport fleets numbering in the dozens of aircraft, not hundreds and for the decade or two after WW II the need to replace the WW II surplus transports wasn't a high priority.
 
Same is true today SR, most EU countries have very little in the way of lift or heavy lift capacity.
 
Coming late to the party, but - The airplane on the list that had the most influence was the C-54.
Not only was it the first economically practical transoceanic transport, it changed the face of air travel from its point of introduction on.
That being said, my only regret was that I also couldn't upvote the C-47 and C-46.
The C-47 doesn't need any justification - If I'm flying one, I'm sure that I can take it anywhere and get in and out with it. The USAF is still flying some DC-3s - they have some Basler conversions used for Special Ops stuff.
The C-46 was the unsung workhorse - As has been pointed out, It can haul twice the load of a Goon, and has much more volume. While it didn't do a lot of paratrooping during World War 2, it was the backbone of the Troop Carrier Command through the postwar era until replaced in regular units by the C-119 through the early '50s, and in the Air Force Reserves in about 1957. The Air Commandos flew them in the early '60s.
They were the solid runner for tactical airlift in Korea, carrying the full load in the periods when the C-119s were grounded or restricted from carrying passengers (Happened a lot - engine and propeller troubles), and they dropped troops from the 187th Airborne RCT on at least 2 occasions.

The others just don't stack up - for some reason, the European designers have never been able to hit the sweet spot of maximum load with a strong lightweight structure - this means that for a given airplane, you have less disposable load for a given airplane size, and the payload -> range tradeoffs are less favorable.
 

Great points - keep in mind that although the C-54 ushered "the next generation," the DC-3/ C-47 was still more cost effective in some circles due to an extensive and well established supply chain. Although the C-54 offered greater performance, you had 2 more engines so twice the maintenance tasking and fuel consumption on shorter routes. That's where the DC-3 held it's dominance.

BTW - the USAF doesn't operate C-47s. The Basler conversion aircraft are leased and not part of the official inventory. I believe they are maintained and operated by civilians.
 
We all know the Albatross was wood and the Connie was metal, right? And it had 3 tails, not 2, and the Albatross was basically a scaled-up light aircraft that cruised at about 220mph. The Connie was a real transport that cruised at 340 mph, a speed the Hurricane could not reach behind a Merlin, and was only 20 mph slower than the max speed of the early Spitfires. At max speed, it went 377 mph, FASTER than an early Spitfire.

Fighter Rebuilders is currently restoring a Connie. It was General McArthur's personal aircraft, and is coming along nicely for the new owner. What a plane! It is amazing, up close and personal. It had range of 5,400 miles and 3,500 HP engines. Then Albatross had a 900 mile range and 525 HP engines. No comparison and termites would not hurt a Connie, unlike an Albatrosss. Not that it encountered Nazi termites ... it didn't. It encountered wood rot due to wet conditions. In fact, a crash grounded the surviving Albatrosses for wood rot.

No Connie ever rotted away from wood issues. They built 7 Albatrosses and 877 Constellations. You decide which was a better bet for airline profit!

I'm leaning Constellation myself, by something like a landslide ...
 
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Seriously Greg, the Albatross was only ever designed as a light transport/mail plane.

And the numbers you quote were for the Super Constellation L-1049G, Its first flight was 17 years after that of the Albatorss, 18 years after the first flight of the Spitfire, 19 years after the first flight of the Hurricane and 12+ years after the Hurricane was withdrawn from front line service as a fighter.

When the Super Constellation was entering service de Havilland weren't building Albatrosses - they were building the first jet liner, the Comet.

While the Comet didn't enjoy the success the Constellation did, there were some factors involved in that - like de Havilland finding out about the not so well understood phenomenon of fatigue.

The Comet I's first flight was 2 years before the Super Constellations's first flight. It entered airline service shortly after the Super Connie.

The Comet I didn't have the range, was slightly short of seating capacity but had a cruising speed more than 100mph better than the Super Constellation,

The first Super Constellation to have the Turbo-Compound R-3350 was the L-1049C, which first flew in 1953. It's cruise speed was 304mph, Top speed 330mph.

Nearly 3/4 of all Constellations built were Super Constellations, and just under half of those were military variants.
 
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