Design and Development
The United States Army Air Forces commissioned the DC-6 project as the XC-112 in 1944. The Army Air Forces wanted an expanded, pressurized version of the popular DC-4 based C-54 Skymaster transport with improved engines. By the time the renamed XC-112A flew, the war was over and the USAAF had rescinded its requirement.
Douglas converted its prototype into a civil transport (redesignated YC-112A, having significant differences from subsequent production DC-6 aircraft) and delivered the first production DC-6 in March 1947. However, a series of mysterious inflight fires (including the fatal crash of United Airlines Flight 608) grounded the DC-6 fleet later that year. The cause was found to be a fuel vent located adjacent to the cabin cooling turbine intake. All DC-6s in service were modified to correct the problem and the fleet was flying again after just four months on the ground.
Read more about this topic: Douglas DC-6
Famous quotes containing the words design and/or development:
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)