Eventually even shorter run airliners would become fast jets. You wouldn’t imagine that so quickly after introduction, they would be serving in Turkey. No wonder the country decided that fact deserved a stamp, airmail of course. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The DC-9 was pretty revolutionary in Turkey circa 1967. Two earlier similar size airliners, the Fokker Friendship, and the Vickers Viscount, are shown on this series of stamps. Their Rolls Royce Dart turboprop engines limited them to under 300 miles an hour. The DC-9 cruised at 560 miles an hour with it’s Pratt and Whitney turbofans. The stamp set also includes an aging DC-3 airliner, showing the luck of the draw possible to a Turkish traveler in 1967.
Todays stamp is issue C41, an 130 Kurus airmail stamp issued by Turkey on July 13th,1967. It was a 5 stamp issue in various denominations showing various airliners in local livery. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents used.
Douglas Aircraft had long been interested in short haul jet airliners to replace their old DC-3 propeller aircraft. Funds for development however were short. So instead they negotiated a license with Sud Aviation of France to market their Caravelle short haul jet airliner in the USA. If there were enough orders, USA assembly of the Caravelle would have been part of the deal. Orders were not forthcoming and the license was allowed to expire. Boeing was set to offer their 727 trijet into the short haul market. This relied on much design work from the large 707 and thus was perhaps too much plane for the job. Douglas therefore designed a smaller twin jet with five across seating and with the engines on tail pods. This allowed the plane to sit lower to the ground. It also was able to operate with a crew of two instead of three. Engines on tail pods can be trouble because the wings can block airflow to the engines at certain flight angles causing stalls. Douglas addressed this by designing vortilons on the leading edge of the wings that try to direct more airflow to the engines. The DC-9 entered service in 1965 and was a big success with 2441 planes made over a 41 year production life. Over that time the name changed twice to reflect corporate musical chairs. First the DC9-80 became the MD-80 to reflect Douglas Aircraft’s merger with the McDonnell fighter company and then the MD-95 became the Boeing 717 after being merged.
As with so much these days once manufactured in the West, there is an afterlife in the East. The MD-90 model of the DC-9 was licensed made in China. When that ended the tooling was not returned to the USA. Instead a Chinese company called Comac put it back into production as the ARJ21. The DC-9 remember is now quite old and more modern airliners are about 25 percent more efficient. So the new model is reengined and has a more modern wing designed for China by Russia’s Antonov. Conarc claims the plane is all new and designed by Chinese supercomputers. Any resemblance to the DC-9 is coincidental. The new wing proved quite challenging and the plane has not sold well taking forever to get certified as airworthy. It did recently get a big order for 25 airplanes from startup Genghis Kahn Airways.
The Turkish DC-9s had an interesting afterlife back in the USA. In the USA in 1993, there was a new low cost startup airline called Valuejet. They bought a second hand fleet of 25+ year old DC-9s including from Turkey. The workers were non union and much plane maintenance was outsourced. Pilots were even required to pay for their own continuing training which no airline had done before. The old airliners proved to be maintenance headaches and there was a big push in the FAA to ground the airline. After a crash, it was grounded for six months. When flights resumed, it was only with 15 of it’s 50 plus airplanes. Valuejet ordered 50 new 717s and changed it’s name to AirTran to overcome the infamy. It was eventually sold to Southwest, an all 737 airline. The 717s were resold to Delta who is finding cheap paid for DC-9/717s hard to replace.
Well my drink is empty and I will put the bottle away. I will need it if the day ever comes when I am to fly on one of Genghis Kahn Airways DC-9 knockoffs. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.