Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!

When I was a small boy I would go out into the back yard and while she was hanging up clothes  I would  look up in the sky and say,”Airplane! Airplane! Airplane!”  And the one I remember was the “Flying Boxcar” because of its unique twin-boom design.

The C-119  “Flying Boxcar”, which was developed from the Fairchild C-82  “Packet”, which was designed as a transport plane. Transport planes move cargo, whether men or material. The Flying Boxcar had huge clamshell doors at the rear of the fuselage to easily facilitate the loading or unloading of cargo.  It was also a good platform from which paratroopers could jump. Occasionally, the rear doors were removed so that cargo could be easily dropped by parachute. The C-119 was designed and built by Fairchild.  The plane first introduced in 1947 ceased production in 1955.The Fairchild manufactured C-119s were powered by the two huge Pratt and Whitney 4360 engines.  With these the plane had a cruising speed of 200 mile per hour while carrying twenty-seven thousand five hundred pounds of cargo or 95 fully equipped troops. These huge 28 cylinder engines produced 3,500 hp each. The C-119s manufactured by Kaiser had the smaller Wright R-3350-85 engines and were designated  for Marine and Navy use.  The Navy department designation for the C-119 was R4Q.  They were used extensively in the Korean War particularly as troop transport and for paratroop drops.  In the French Indochina War they were loaned to the French but flown by American pilots employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.  Later in that same area, during the Vietnam War, some C-119s were converted to flying gun platforms as the AC-119K “Stinger”. In later years these airplanes were frequently outfitted with auxiliary jet engines to carry additional weight. This was called the “Jet-Pack” modification.  The civilian versions mounted a turbojet on a pylon atop the fuselage while the military version carried a jet engine under each wing.  Many C-119s saw service as tanker planes with the US Forest Service. 

The Flying Boxcar last flew for the US military in 1974.

Interestingly enough the most memorable rendering of the aircraft on film was probably in the 1965 film, "The Flight of the Phoenix".  The film starred Jimmy Stewart a former Army Air Corps bomber pilot in World War Two. There is considerable discussion about the film in the comments regarding my video, "Corncobs & Boxcars" .