Avoiding Regret: Photo Essay: A Warbird Flies Over the LA Basin

February 15, 2016

Photo Essay: A Warbird Flies Over the LA Basin

I can remember my first time in any aircraft. It was a helicopter flight over Lake Placid and the Adirondack mountains of Upstate New York, and it made me incredibly air sick.

I was probably 10 years old.

I didn't fly again until something like a decade later, when I boarded my first commercial airplane: a Virgin Atlantic flight from New York's JFK to London Heathrow for my semester abroad.

Since then, I've been a passenger on plenty of other airlines—American, Delta, US Airways, United, Aer Lingus, Lufthansa, Air France, Air Tran, Virgin America, JetBlue, and even the defunct Song (which only operated from 2003-2006).

I also managed to get on two round trips on a private plane in 2012.

I've flown a sailplane, and I've jumped out of a plane with a guy strapped to my back.

But until this weekend, I'd never experienced what it was like for the first passengers to ever take a commercial flight.

On Valentine's Day morning, I arrived to the Pacific Jet Center at Long Beach Airport to take a scenic flight over the LA basin in a Douglas DC-3A...

...the model of airplane that lured passengers off the rails and into the air, ushering in a new era of air travel...

...that offered longer distances, shorter travel times, and the ability to bring a dozen or two people all to the same destination.

Back in 1936 when the first DC-3 commercial flight was offered, it changed everything—and it began to pioneer new flight paths across the United States.

But while passengers enjoyed the comfort of the spacious DC-3—which could also accommodate sleeper beds—

...by the time World War II hit, the DC-3's were commandeered by the military.

This veteran plane was manufactured in Santa Monica as a C-53D and was converted into a DC-3. It became a staple throughout WWII, dropping paratroopers to invade Sicily in 1943, Normandy on D-Day in 1944, and Germany in 1945.

But after the war, ownership of this NC43XX (now a DC-3) transferred to TWA, then Northeast Airlines, and then United from 1945 to 1952.

Appropriately, one of its post-war owners (there were over a dozen of them from 1953 to 2006) used it to drop skydivers (not paratroopers) over Connecticut.