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Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins
Sorry. My bad - I'll knock it off. Supposed to be a pictures thread.
Cool airplane. I did a little work helping to restore this one for use by Everett Community College in their airplane mechanic program.
These things had a horrible start to their commercial air service. The square windows were the root of the problem - multiple pressurization cycles started cracking the fuselages at the corners of the windows. Several suffered catastrophic failures as a result and went in, killing all on board. The oval windows on the one I worked on were the solution. Tragic story, really. |
I saw one documentary about the crashes of the early British aircraft. It all came down to those windows. Had they had round windows initially they would have had a huge lead in the aviation industry, and may well have been the center of aircraft manufacturing. With the airplanes crashing no one wanted to fly on them, and they lost the lead.