This Old DC3

How amazing, an airplane over seventy five years old that’s still in service. We’re looking at a legendary Douglas DC3, the backbone of many fledgling airlines back in the day. And they were heavily used by the military circa World War Two, as a C-47 Skytrain (or Dakota in Commonwealth circles). This particular plane carries the ALCI Aviation logo (Antarctic Logistics Centre International), but is registered to Kenn Borek Air of Calgary. At home in rugged areas of the world this one was used to bringing supplies into remote camps, or in support of scientific ventures down near the south pole. Some years back it was involved in a mishap while operating down there – but everyone walked away.

The Borek firm has something like nine of these old DC3s. They can carry cargo, passengers or a mix of two and can be outfitted with wheels or skis.

Over sixteen thousand of these planes were built in the 1930s-1940s. Surprisingly up to a couple thousand are listed as operational in recent times. They’re rugged, capable and simple and there in lies the appeal. Pretty hard to kill one. Load up it up and it’ll handle the task. You can patch it up with duct tape and binder twine (well a bit of an exaggeration). You get the idea and even today nothing can really match them when it comes to severe service applications. This DC3 was rebuilt at one point, with modern turbo-props replacing the original piston engines, but otherwise keeping that classic look.

What a beauty!

From the same memory card dump: Wandering the Alberta Central Railway Museum – TRAINS!

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.

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Date of adventure: April, 2019.
Location: Calgary International Airport.

Peeking through the fence at Calgary International.