In the years just after WWII, Consolidated tried real hard to get the airlines to buy their Model 37, AKA the C-99. This cargo version of the B-36 bomber featured a big fat pressurized two-deck fuselage, and as a passenger liner could carry 204. While the fuselage was about 3/4 the size as that of the modern Airbus A-380, it only carried a quarter the number of passengers… partly due to weight restrictions, but also importantly because the passengers were not crammed in like sardines. There appears to have been this semi-mythical thing called “legroom” incorporated into the design… and for those who paid extra, actual *rooms.* Much like trains, you could get a sleeping berth and some privacy.
United Airlines ordered 15 of them. Sadly, the airliner did not enter service… the piston engines were not very economical, and turboprops adequate to the task were problematic. It would have been an expensive maintenance hog… but it would’ve been the queen of the skies.
5 Responses to “Flyin’ in Style”
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I saw parts of the XC-99 when I was visiting the Museum in Dayton a couple of years ago. Alas, I couldn’t take any pictures as they were outside the hangers and so were verboten. I remember seeing the wheel well, I believe, and thinking it was just ridiculously huge and just a small part of the total plane…
I saw the enourmas white corpse of the C99 many times in the seventies when TDY in San Antonio. It sat on it’s gear out in the no-mans land just outside Kelly AFB. Quite a sight from the expressway on the way to traing classes at Kelly.
-Brazell
An interesting engineering problem would be: To calculate the maximum possible size for an aircraft.
Hey Jordan,go to USSR-airspace.com (I think this the right website) and check out some of the
stuff that Russia designed that never still made it off the drawing boards and think about that one…
they are models but still give the dimensions if they were full size.
only thing better would’ve been powering it from the nuclear reactor that was test flown in a B-36 as part of a long endurance bomber craft. Perhaps with little parasite shuttle jets like the XF85 Goblin 🙂