EVERETT — After more than a decade of restoration work, the Museum of Flight’s Boeing 247 took off Tuesday morning for the last time. The plane flew from Paine Field to Seattle’s Boeing Field, where it is slated to join the museum’s permanent collection.
A small crowd of folks who’d helped get it back to flying condition and airplane enthusiasts gathered to see the plane off.
After running through the preflight checklist, the pilot waved a hand through an open cockpit window to the ground crew, and the plane’s right engine coughed and came to life. The copilot signaled, and the left engine’s blades started spinning.
The plane’s powerful Pratt &Whitney Wasp engines and its sleek, all-metal design helped it revolutionize commercial aviation when it was introduced in 1933. The design and other features, such as retractable landing gear, set the standard for commercial prop airliners. It is widely considered to be the first modern airliner.
With room for 10 passengers, it was big for its time. It was fast, too. Its launch customer, United Air Lines, advertised it as the “three-mile-a-minute airplane,” and it made it possible to fly across the United States in one day.
Plenty of airlines were interested in the revolutionary airliner, but Boeing could not meet demand. Also, it had committed the first 60 airplanes to United, which it owned through its conglomerate United Aircraft and Transportation Co.
Other airplane manufacturers were working on similar designs. The Douglas DC-2 and Lockheed Electra went into production shortly after the 247, and had much greater commercial success. In the end, Boeing only sold 75 of its revolutionary airliner.
The Boeing 247 also claims a tragic first: the first proven case of sabotage of a commercial airliner. On Oct. 10, 1933, a United transcontinental flight exploded in mid-air near Chesterton, Indiana. The plane’s four passengers and three crew members died in the crash. Investigators determined that a nitroglycerin-based bomb brought the plane down, but no suspect has ever been identified.
The Museum of Flight acquired its Boeing 247 in the late 1960s. Before that, it had been used for spraying crops. The museum regularly flew the plane at airshows for much of the next few decades. However, a problem with the landing gear ended its flying days in the early 2000s. After that, it went to the museum’s Restoration Center at Paine Field, where volunteers and staff members spent countless hours working on it.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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