[Don Plumley]

From Jalopnik:

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: