19381776 Club
Carl Cover lifts Douglas's four-engine DC-4E off Clover Field; the airlines that paid for it are already unsure they want it
The 97-foot prototype carries nosewheel gear, air conditioning, and power-boosted controls, a constellation of firsts that its backers call too costly to maintain.
Before a single DC-3 had carried a paying passenger, United Air Lines was already lobbying Douglas for something twice as large. The result, the DC-4E, lifted off from Clover Field in Santa Monica on June 7, 1938, piloted by Carl Cover — a 97-foot, four-engine behemoth bristling with firsts: nosewheel landing gear, auxiliary power units, power-boosted controls, and air conditioning. The airlines that bankrolled it ultimately rejected it as too expensive and too complex to maintain. Within eighteen months, Douglas had sold the sole prototype to Imperial Japanese Airways, which handed it to Nakajima Aircraft engineers who quietly dismantled it — and used what they learned to build a bomber…
