Wonderful old aircraft. Clearly this one has been upgraded with turboprop engines. I am sure this dramatically improves its performance over the old piston engines. Maintained the radio equipment on the DC3 aircraft for many years in my early days in Papua New Guinea in the mid 60's. At that stage there were virtually no roads in PNG and everything for the highland areas was carried from Madang airport by these old workhorses. I remember one day the two operating airlines had a competition to see who could uplift the most freight in a single day - there was no winner - each airline uplifted 250,000 lbs of cargo. Put this into the perspective that at the time there was no night flying so that this enormous amount of cargo was carried in the 12 daylight hours of the tropical day. Amazing.

Written on 2021年 06月 04日

Love seeing pictures of the old warrior. Wonderful memories of my years servicing the radio installations on Dc3's in Papua New Guinea in the 60's and 70's. Many exciting flights into many very marginal airstrips in even more marginal weather. Most of the seating back then was side saddle - a row down each side of the fuselage and sometimes in the middle as well. Those were the days.

Written on 2019年 06月 01日

Very interesting to see this picture. I believe that this aircraft along with a sister ship VH-BFB was operating in Papua New Guinea during 1965/6 with Ansett MAL and based in Madang. I worked in Madang as a LAME (radio systems)during these years and was responsible for the maintenance of their radio systems. My recollection of the few flights I did in them was that they were cold and extremely noisy. TAA also operated 2 Bristol freighters out of Madang at that time. As a point of interest, the aircraft registered as VH-BFC operated by Ansett MAL after the departure of the Bristols was to my knowledge the only Caribou aircraft in civil service. I cannot recall whether the VH prefix was changed to P2 in Papua New Guinea at self government in 1972 or until independence in 1975.

Written on 2018年 01月 07日

This photo sure brings back memories of the many years I spent in Papua New Guinea in the 60's and 70's when the DC-3 was the frontline aircraft of the domestic carriers. The DC-3 was the only freight link with the highlands areas before the road network was started. In the mid 60's Madang airport was the second busiest airport in the Southern Hemisphere for aircraft movements - second only to Sydney. After one busy day there were 19 DC-3's lined up on the tarmac loaded and ready for another day with the same amount of workload.

Written on 2016年 08月 18日