Warbird Information Exchange

Okay, folks... Flagship Tulsa is loaded and left Oshkosh about five hours ago!!! Here are the rest of the photos of the dismantling and loading process, for your viewing pleasure. Again, many thanks to the great folks at Basler Turbo Conversions, and congratulations to our all-volunteer team. Now comes the hard part- restoring her and putting her back together. As always, it's going to require tons of labor and cash. Anyone who wants to help out with either, we're quite grateful. Just let me know. For those interested, FST is travelling south from Oshkosh to Tulsa, OK and may be seen during daylight hours loaded on three Melton trucks. Its ETA is Wednesday in Tulsa, Thursday over to the museum for a Friday morning press conference. Then Friday mid-day over to AA for the start of restoration!

kevin

Some interior shots...









And the final disassembly...















And onto the trailers it goes!

How bout them Pratts?














One sexy beast!








The truckers!



The team!



Ready to come home.



kevin

Looks to be a fairly nice project. Congrats.

Man, you have a talent for understatement ...

at AviaS199....couldn't have written that in Hollywood

I've seen this on many a DC-3, especially with Wrights, where visiblie on the lower outter portion of the firewall is the cutout for the exhaust stack however it has been faired over. Can anyone explain to me why this is?

Flagship Tulsa was originally Wright-powered, but converted to Pratts sometime after AA disposed of her. I'd imagine that explains the modification to the nacelles, vernicator.

Scott,

Trans-Texas converted FST to "DC-3A" status on 4-20-49. I'd guess that's probably when the conversion took place, with some war-surplus Pratts.

kevin

Thanks, Kevin.

I think you sent me the photo of the conversion dataplate earlier, but I was too lazy to look for it last night. That date would indeed have been when the P&Ws went on, making it a DC-3A.

Scott

Hey Scott...

Guess what's big and white and sitting on the ramp in front of the museum RIGHT NOW???



kevin

Congratulations on getting the airplane to Tulsa!

Scott

Actually that would be backwards. Usually the pratts have the longer stack that fist into that "nook" and the Wrights had the short stack that jutted out the side...very weird how there is such a variety of this little detail amongst the DC-3/C-47 world.

Pratt:



Wright:

The longer exhust pipes usually have a heat exchanger built around the straight part of the pipe. The hot fresh air from the heat exchanger is ducted to the cabin and cockpit for heating.

If you have a look at the photo in the previous post above you can see the inlet pipe for the heat exchanger level with the cowl gill.

I have seen the long pipe on both P&W and wright powered DC-3's.

Jason

Jason is correct, the original installation on AA's aircraft had the long exhaust stack as shown on this photo of Flagship San Francisco. Flagship Knoxville, in the AA Museum at Fort Worth, has Wright engines and the long stacks identical to these:


Flagship Detroit had the short stacks installed at some time in the past.

Scott

It's home! After a long journey (about 1100 miles on backroads from Wisconsin) Flagship Tulsa is back home. Again, thanks to the folks at Melton Truck Lines for taking care of the shipping for us. They were great!

We had a press conference last Friday to welcome home the aircraft. Three local news stations, the local paper, other publications, a representative from the mayor's office and the local AA VP were all on hand.









Who is that fat guy in the striped shirt on the left? (It's me! It's me!)


We then took FST over to American Airlines yesterday. One of the first projects that AA completed at the Tulsa maintenance base in the 1940's after they completed the move from New York was the decommissioning of the DC-3 fleet. The DC-3s were routed through Tulsa to be prepared for sale. FST was sold to Trans-Texas in February of 1949, so it is likely that yesterday represented the first time this aircraft had been back at this maintenance base in 59 years. How cool is that? It is actually parked out in front of one of the original WWII hangars used by AA. First we dropped off a few things at another site, and then off to AA! We certainly stopped traffic on port road and Mingo.





























kevin

Hello all!

Thought I'd provide an update that is quite exciting for us- Flagship Tulsa is in an AA hangar, and restoration has begun! For those of you who are familiar with the Tulsa AA maintenance base, it's in 4D. Photos below. When you see the last photo, with the MD-80 nearby, it sure gives you a sense of perspective on how little this bird really is.

kevin