Classroom clipper, Vol. I, No. 7, April 1945

              April, 1945	Published by Pan American World Airways	Vol. I, No. 7
POST WAR CLIPPERS WITH CAPACITIES UP TO 204
WILL PROVIDE AIR TRANSPORT FOR AVERAGE MAN
MODEL 37—The Consolidated Vultee has been designed to carry 204 passengers and 15,300 pounds of baggage, mail and express at 310 to 342 miles per hour on flights such as New York to London. This is a photograph of a model.
Planes Have been Ordered from Consolidated, Douglas and Lockheed
The Clipper fleet of the future is taking shape on designers’ drawing boards, and, in some cases, on the manufacturer’s production lines.
Latest announcement has to do‘ with the largest air transport proposed to date—the huge Consolidated Vultee Model 37 which would be capable of carrying 204 passengers and 7 tons of mail and freight non-stop across the North Atlantic to Europe.
Others previously nominated for the fleet of the future include:
The Douglas DC-7. This is a 108-passenger long range air transport for service to Latin America and other long distance services.
The Douglas DC-6. This airplane is a further development of the C-S4 (DC-4) which has been a star performer for both the Army and Navy in World War II as a transport for personnel and cargo and as an ambulance plane. The DC-6 is proposed for use on the west coast of South America routes of Pan American Grace Airways, and on a number of routes within the United States.
The Lockheed Constellation. Orders for Constellations likewise were on the manufacturer’s books before the war, but the planes were delivered to the Army. Pan American recently was allotted two of them for operation on its Army contract division.
Model 37 is the Largest
Note that the Model 37, the DC-7 and the DC-6 are projected airplanes, in various stages of design and engineering development. The Constellation is in production and in service, consequently would be the first available for peace time use. However, production facilities created to meet War requirements guarantee that, once Victory has been achieved, the new huge transports for mass transportation in the Air Age can be produced and delivered in a very brief time.
Pan American’s contract with Consolidated calls for construction of up to 15 of the huge Model 37’s, a fleet which would be capable of carrying 750,000 passengers a year in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific services.
The Model 37 is to weigh 320,000 pounds, about twelve times as much as the twin-engined Douglas DC-3 which is flown on
most of the domestic air lines within the United States.
Its passenger capacity of 204 is the largest to date. (The record for number of passengers carried in regularly scheduled commercial air-line service is 62, in a Clipper of the Boeing 314 flying boat type.)
Its wing span is 230 feet, more than twice the span of a Liberator B-24 bomber, and its height is equal to that of a 21-story building. Its length is 182 feet. The size of the Model 37 is approximately equivalent to that of the Brabazon, designed by the British for international operation on the routes of British Overseas Airways Corporation.
A specially noteworthy feature of the Model 37 is its power plant. It is to have six engines, transmitting power to six propellers of the “pusher” type — behind the wing instead of ahead of it.
Neither the number nor the arrangement of the engines is unprecedented. The Do-X built by the Germans in the twenties had twelve engines, and there have been many airplanes with “pusher” types of power plants, including some of the early Wright
and Curtiss models. However, both the number of engines and their arrangement are new developments for regular scheduled service such as is proposed for the Model 37.
The arrangement was adopted by the designers to take full advantage of laminar air flow.	i
Cruising speed will vary between 310 and 342 miles per hour, according to altitude dictated by wind and weather conditions and power output level selected by the Captain. Cabins will be conditioned by supercharging so that the airplanes can operate at any level up to 30,000 feet so that all storm areas can be avoided, usually by flying over the top, and even in extreme cases by a combination of high flying and by-passing.
With a pay load consisting of 204 passengers plus 15,300 pounds of baggage, mail and express, this Clipper will have a range of 4,200 miles. Thus, it is an airplane for long distance routes where there is heavy traffic, and Pan American plans to assign craft of this type only to such long range heavily traveled sectors as the trans-(Continued on page 4)