- Veronico, Nicholas A.
Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, [2001] 2002.
ISBN 978-1-58007-047-8.
-
The
Boeing 377
Stratocruiser, launched in November 1945, with its first
flight in July 1947 and entry into airline revenue service
with Pan Am in April 1949, embodied the vision of luxurious
postwar air travel based on the technological advances made in
aviation during the war. (Indeed, the 377 inherited much
from the Boeing B-29
and was a commercial derivative of the
XC-97
prototype cargo aircraft.) The Stratocruiser, along with its
contemporaries, the
Lockheed
Constellation and Douglas
DC-7,
represented the apogee of piston powered airliner design. This
was an era in which air travel was a luxury indulged in by the
elite, and passengers were provided amenities difficult to
imagine in our demotic days of flying cattle cars. There was a luxury
compartment seating up to eight people with private
sleeping berths and (in some configurations) a private
bathroom. First class passengers could sleep in seats
that reclined into beds more than six feet long, or in upper
berths which folded out at nighttime. Economy passengers
were accommodated in reclining “sleeperette” seats with
sixty inches seat pitch (about twice that of present
day economy class). Men and women had their own separate
dressing rooms and toilets, and a galley allowed serving multi-course
meals on china with silverware as well as buffet snacks. Downstairs
on the cargo deck was a lounge seating as many as 14 with a
full bar and card tables.
One of the reasons for all of these creature comforts was that
at a typical cruising speed of 300–340 miles per
hour passengers on long haul flights had
plenty of time to appreciate them: eleven hours
on a flight from Seattle to Honolulu, for example.
Even in the 1950s “flying was the safest way to fly”, but
nonetheless taking to the air was much more of an adventure than it is
today, hence all those flight insurance vending machines in airports
of the epoch. Of a total of 56 Boeing 377s built, no fewer than 10
were lost in accidents, costing a total of 135 crew and passenger
lives. Three ditched at sea, including
Pan Am 943,
which went down in mid-Pacific with all onboard rescued by
a Coast Guard weather ship with only a few minor injuries.
In addition to crashes, on two separate occasions the main cabin
door sprang open in flight, in each case causing one person
to be sucked out to their death.
The advent of jet transports brought the luxury piston airliner
era to an abrupt end. Stratocruiser airframes, sold to airlines
in the 1940s for around US$1.3 million each, were offered
in a late 1960 advert in Aviation Week,
“14 aircraft from $75,000.00, flyaway”—how the
mighty had fallen. Still, the book was not yet closed on the 377.
One former Pan Am plane was modified into the
Pregnant
Guppy airlifter, used to transport NASA's
S-IV and
S-IVB upper
stages for the
Saturn I,
IB,
and
V
rockets from the manufacturer in
California to the launch site in Florida. Later other 377 and
surplus C-97 airframes were used to assemble
Super Guppy
cargo planes, one of which remains in service with NASA.
This book provides an excellent look into a long-gone era of
civil aviation at the threshold of the jet age. More
than 150 illustrations, including eight pages in colour,
complement the text, which is well written with only a few
typographical and factual errors. An appendix provides pictures
of all but one 377 (which crashed into San Francisco Bay on a
routine training flight in 1950, less than a month
after being delivered to the airline), with a complete
operational history of each.
September 2008 