2,000 Greater & Lesser Mysteries/2,000 Greater and Lesser Mysteries.iso/geninfo/mys00596.txt/text0100.txt

Text File | 1994-06-10 | 1.5 KB | 29 lines

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Terrell D. Drinkard) writes:
|> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (David Moore) writes:
|> >I have no idea why they were delivering via London.
|>
|> Possibly to reproduce the MacRobertson Race of 1932 or '33.  That went from
|> London to Sydney, as I recall.  The Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC-2 came in
|> second and third behind a special build DeHavilland  racer.  That was a
|> remarkable period of change in the airplane industry.  However, that race
|> tooks a few weeks (all of this is from memory - I don't have any references
|> on it, or if I do I don't know where they are :-).

For the sake of historical accuracy, London to Melbourne, 1932.
As I remember, the DC-2 (a standard version flown by a KLM crew) came in
second (first in the handicapped class) and might have won overall if it
hadn't had engine trouble a couple of hundred miles from Melbourne.
The race took around ten days. Cruising speed, 250-300 mph. Individual
legs 1000 miles max (they couldn't fly Darwin to Sydney nonstop, had to
refuel in some awful place in the interior). As Terry says, it showed the
ongoing revolution in the airline industry.

As to the Qantas delivery, LHR-SYD was presumably the route they needed to
advertize, more so than LAX-SYD which would have been the obvious one.

Daan Sandee                                           [e-mail]
Thinking Machines Corporation
Cambridge, Mass 02142                                 [phone]