Navy retires the C9-B (DC-9)

Don Plumley · Don Plumley's Garage

From Jalopnik:

Quote:

After some 41 years and over 1.3M mishap free flight hours, the the US Navy has retired its last C-9 Skytrain II. To many who flew it or loved watching it from the ground, it will be sorely missed.

Based directly on the hardy McDonnell Douglas DC-9 airliner, the aircraft first entered military service with USAF in 1966 as the C-9A Nightingale. It wasn't until 1973 that the US Navy got its first four C-9Bs, named Skytrain II, thus bringing the Navy into the jet-transport age.

The service's love affair with the aircraft would blossom over the following decades, with a total of 29 C-9Bs operating by the late 1980s. The jet was said to have been utterly reliable and pilot friendly, and its reconfigurable cabin was a real plus for the Navy's needs as it could be a airliner one day and a cargo hauler the next. The Skytrain II also had the ability to operate out of airfields with little airliner infrastructure due to its tail-cone mounted air-stair, and its large clamshell cargo door allowed for full jet engines and other outsized cargo to be loaded with relative ease.

I sold cockpit switches and airframe sensors to McD back in the day. This was an engineers company and a pilots airframe. This video sums it up pretty well, especially the way all the main cockpit switches were different so you could operate them by feel in a dark/smoke situation. Old School:

wdfifteen · wdfifteen's Garage

Interesting. In the late 60s, as a college student, I was a subject at Wright-Patterson AFB's Aeromed division in studies to determine the limits of touch-based control surface differentiation. Apparently Douglas had already figured part of it out.

IROC · IROC's Garage

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Plumley

This was an engineers company and a pilots airframe.

Interesting observation. I work for McDonnell Douglas for about a decade before we became Boeing. McDonnell Douglas had a whole different feel than Boeing. McDonnel Douglas felt more "Porsche" in contrast to Boeing's "General Motors" feel.

gshase · 07-21-2014, 04:25 AM

Flew on them many times from NAS Oceania to NAS Jacksonville to catch the Mighty( CV 59) USS Forrestal

dave 911 · dave 911's Garage

Cool aircraft. When I flew S-3's out of North Island, the C-9 squadron was in the hanger next door. So let's see, when I was at NASNI, the Navy was flying S-3's, H-3's, H-46's, C-9's...and we had A-7's, A-6's, F-14's in our air wing . . . all retired now . . .

I'm sure this doesn't mean that I'm also getting old

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