This Commercial Plane Went Supersonic Almost A Decade Before The Concorde And It Wasn’t Even Built To Do It

For years, travelers with enough money and not enough time could connect two points on the globe together quickly by hitching a ride in a Concorde. There was also the short-lived Tupolev Tu-144, but for a glorious period between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, supersonic jet travel was a reality. Yet, neither of those planes were the first airliners to break the sound barrier. That goes to a Douglas DC-8, a plane that wasn’t built for supersonic flight. Yet, test pilots took the DC-8 on a flight they bet Boeing would never try with a 707.

This story comes to us thanks to a fun post on X from Andrew King and a post from the National Air And Space Museum. A large part of commercial aircraft manufacturing is marketing. If you’re Boeing or Airbus you want to give the airlines a reason to choose your aircraft over the other guy’s. That might seem a bit difficult in this era when it seems only avgeeks can tell the difference between an Airbus A320neo and a Boeing 737 MAX, but the differences are there.

In the modern day, we’ve seen aircraft manufacturers like Bombardier try to undercut the competition on price with the C-Series. Meanwhile, Boeing tried, and failed badly, to market the 737 MAX as an aircraft that existing 737 NG pilots could fly without much additional training. Sometimes you might also see a new airliner do a steep climb during an air show.

Things were a bit wilder in decades past when test pilots got a bit nutty in their missions to show that their company’s aircraft was built better than the rest.

Perhaps one of the most famous instances of this involved Alvin Melvin “Tex” Johnston, then a test pilot with Boeing. In 1955, he was tasked with flying a Boeing 367-80, the engineering prototype that would lead to the 707, over a crowd. Instead, Tex performed not one, but two barrel rolls.

This unsanctioned stunt remains a famous moment in aviation history and when Boeing company brass asked what in the world he was doing, Tex said he was just “selling planes. It wasn’t even a decade later when test pilots over at Douglas pulled off a daring stunt of their own.

One-Upping The Competition

The world of aviation went through a revolution after World War II. Prop-driven aircraft were quickly becoming old news and jet power was seen as the future.

The de Havilland Comet helped usher in the onset of commercial jet travel when it took its first flight in 1949 before going into service in 1952 with the British Overseas Airways Corporation. America wasn’t too far behind. Boeing began the development of what would become the 707 back in 1949 and the aforementioned Dash 80 made its first flight in 1954.

At the time, Douglas Aircraft was a dominant force with its DC piston-engine aircraft. Travelers in the 1930s might have found themselves in a DC-2 while Douglas kept its piston-engine airliner production going into the late 1950s with the DC-6 and DC-7. The DC-3 and its C-47 Skytrain variant were so influential and so rugged that large numbers of these aircraft survive and fly today despite being in the ballpark of 80 years old or older.

Douglas came a little late into the era of first-generation jet airliners. As a retrospective by AirlineRatings points out, Douglas knew the future was in jet transport, but Donald Douglas didn’t believe that the jet engines of the early 1950s were as reliable or as thrifty as they needed to be. Worse was the fact that airlines were still happy to put down hard cash for piston airliners and they might have needed time before they were willing to plunk down money on jets.

Douglas was such a market leader in piston aircraft that it put out an advertisement claiming twice as many people fly in Douglas planes than all other manufacturers combined.

Winds of change came in 1952 when the United States Air Force launched a bid to replace its KC-97 piston-driven tankers. See, military jets like the Boeing B-47 and the Boeing B-52 were taking to the skies in the Cold War and while these bombers were great, the USAF wasn’t fond of refueling them because the existing tankers flew 200 mph slower. That practically made the bombers sitting ducks. The military wanted heavy tankers that could fly as fast as the aircraft they would be refueling.

Douglas was not about to be left behind and launched its own jet transport program in June of that year. This was an ambitious project for Douglas. As I said before, Douglas Aircraft was known best for its piston aircraft and jet development was still a pretty new thing over there. Meanwhile, the USAF wanted new tankers to feed the Boeing jets that were already flying.

As Airways Magazine writes, Chief Project Engineer Ivor Shogrun took his team through hundreds of designs, including evaluations of the Comet design and even a Delta wing. Ultimately, they landed on building an aircraft with swept wings and jet engines mounted under the wings and housed in pods. The successor to the DC-7 was underway.

By the end of 1954, Douglas was still behind Boeing. The company spent $3 million and 250,000 hours developing the DC-8 and had a mock-up of the aircraft plus a proposal for the USAF. Meanwhile, Boeing’s Dash 80 was an already flying proposal. Reportedly, Douglas wasn’t too worried about this because historically, the government awarded contracts to more than just one manufacturer.

Things worked out differently here as in early 1955, the government ordered 21 Boeing KC-135s before evaluations were complete and before Douglas could even catch up. Donald Douglas went to Washington to beg for a chance, but the decision was made. Reportedly, this caused Douglas to change gears. It thought if Boeing was going to be tied up into this tanker business and its other competitors were still messing about with piston-engine aircraft, at least it could come out in front of this new age of jet-powered passenger travel. Thus, the DC-8 was greenlit as an airliner project.

Douglas would learn that Boeing was making a commercial airliner, too, but Douglas making a jet airliner was still a winning decision. Pan Am ordered 45 first-generation passenger jets and 25 of them were DC-8s. United Airlines also signed up for 30 DC-8s for $175 million, reportedly the biggest commercial airliner order at the time. Douglas was so good at scooping up orders that Boeing announced that it was widening the 707 fuselage by 10 inches so that it would be as spacious as the DC-8 was promising to be.

I’ll let Boeing continue from here:

The DC-8 was the first Douglas jet-powered transport. It entered service simultaneously with United Airlines and Delta Air Lines on Sept. 18, 1959. Powered by four jet turbine engines, the DC-8 was capable of speeds of more than 600 mph. Throughout its 14-year-long production run, the DC-8 went through seven major variants, for a total of 556 aircraft. The basic domestic version, the DC-8 Series 10, had increased fuel capacity for intercontinental flights, and the Series 30 and 40 were the first to use the 17,500-pound-thrust turbojet engines.

The DC-8 Series 50 were the first DC-8s powered by new, more efficient turbofan jet engines with 18,000 pounds thrust and longer range. The Series 50 were also the first to be offered customers in the convertible passenger-freight version or the windowless all-freight version. The DC-8 Series 60 extended the length of the fuselage. Nearly 37 feet longer than the original model, in an all-economy passenger configuration, the DC-8-61 could carry 260 people; its convertible-freighter configuration had a cargo volume of 12,535 cubic feet. The DC-8-62, for extra-long routes, had a fuselage stretched another 6 feet 8 inches and 3-foot wingtip extensions.

All design improvements of the DC-8-61 and -62 were incorporated in the DC-8-63. The -63 could fly more than 4,500 miles nonstop, carrying 259 passengers because of its extended fuselage; aerodynamic improvements to nacelles, pylons and flaps; and increased wingspan and fuel capacity. In 1995, more than 300 DC-8s remained in service, making more than 340 scheduled flights a day. Its versatility allowed it to be fitted with high-bypass turbofan engines by another company and called the Series 70.

Going Supersonic

While Douglas developed the DC-8 quickly, it never fully caught up to the Boeing 707. The Boeing took to the skies five months sooner than the Douglas. Airlines were still sending orders to Douglas, but the manufacturer wanted to do something different to sell its plane.

Back during the testing phases, Douglas test pilots would fly the DC-8 to its maximum speed. William Magruder was one of those test pilots and he was the co-pilot in the DC-8’s maiden flight back in 1958. Magruder came to Douglas after a career in the military flying such greats like the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, Martin B-57 Canberra, and North American F-86 Sabre. He also flew with the legends like Chuck Yeager and Tex Johnston.

Magruder’s idea to sell the DC-8 was to beat Boeing at its own game. Tex grabbed headlines with his Dash 80 barrel rolls. Magruder? He wanted to break the sound barrier with the DC-8. Keep in mind that this was 1961, about eight years before the Concorde would even take its first flight. The DC-8’s cruising speed was 0.82 Mach and the maximum design Mach number was 0.95. It was a fast aircraft, but it wasn’t built for supersonic flight.

However, Magruder figured that taking a DC-8 past the sound barrier would prove that Douglas built an incredibly sturdy aircraft. At the same time, he figured Boeing wouldn’t try to follow up the stunt because who wants to take second place?

On August 21, 1961, Magruder joined copilot Paul Patten, flight engineer Joseph Tomich, and flight test engineer Richard H. Edwards aboard Douglas DC-8-43 N9604Z. It was the 130th DC-8 built and was powered by a quartet of Rolls-Royce Conway 509 turbofans making 17,500 pounds of thrust each. The Series 40 DC-8s were a big deal as they were the first turbofan jet airliners, promising a future of better fuel economy, less black smoke, and a quieter ride.

This aircraft wasn’t a test plane, but already painted and ready to fly for Douglas customer Canadian Pacific Air Lines. After the daring test, the Empress of Montreal aircraft was set to go into regular service. While this plane was new, it was already damaged. Flight test engineer Richard H. Edwards reported that someone damaged the aircraft’s leading edge slats on the wings the night before, rendering them non-functional. Edwards then banged the aircraft’s flaps on a workstand during the preflight check, rendering those inoperable, too.

Normally, this would be a problem because these aerodynamic devices generate extra lift and allow the aircraft to handle better at slow speeds. The DC-8 is also designed to take off with its flaps down, locking out the rudder if you try to do so with the flaps up. Yet the pilots carried on, determining that aside from the takeoff roll when all four engines would need to work to maintain control, the damage was irrelevant. After all, they were trying to set a speed record, not fly slow.

As for the planning, Edwards spoke about that to the Smithsonian Magazine:

They had to determine the pushover load factor, the dive angle, to be sure they got to Mach 1.01 at a rather high altitude, so the airspeed wouldn’t be that high up there. [The speed of sound at altitude] is not 700 miles per hour: it’s a lot less. The aerodynamics department, I think under Roger Shaufele, prepared a set of charts. The Mach number itself isn’t used in a dive as a target because it’s much more accurate to use airspeed. So every thousand feet I would read off to Bill the airspeed [he needed] at the next altitude. As we were coming down, I was talking almost all the time because at a descent rate of 500 feet per second, every two seconds we were 1,000 feet lower. Looking out the window—which I stopped doing—it looked like it was straight down.

We took off at Long Beach and flew to Edwards. We only had fuel for a half-hour flight once we got there, because we wanted to be light, to climb.

Joining the DC-8 crew on the record flight was a North American F-100F Super Sabre with a camera and a Lock­heed F-104 Star­fighter chase plane flown by Chuck Yeager. Edwards then continued about the flight itself:

We took it up to 10 miles up, 52,000 feet—that’s a record—and put it in a half-a-G pushover. Bill maintained about 50 pounds of push. He didn’t trim it for the dive so that it would want to pull out by itself. In the dive, at about 45,000 feet, it went to Mach 1.01 for maybe 16 seconds, then he recovered.

But the recovery was a little scary. When he pulled back, the elevator was ineffective; it didn’t do anything, so he said, “Well, I’ll use the stabilizer,” and the stabilizer wouldn’t run. It stalled, because of the load. What he did, because he was smart, is something that no other pilot would do: He pushed over into the dive more, which relieved the load on the stabilizer. He was able to run the [stabilizer] motor, with the relieved load, and he recovered at about 35,000 feet. That’s an unofficial supersonic record, payload record, and of course an altitude record for a commercial transport. I think it took about 10 years for the SSTs to beat that.

To add some context to Edwards’ words, the crew leveled off at 52,090 feet, which had been higher than any commercial airliner had flown at that point. In the story by the Smithsonian Magazine, Edwards recounted how they had flown the DC-8 so high that the sky above them was black. Sure, the pilots commanding high-flying military hardware have seen that before, but we’re talking about a DC-8 here.

The reason Magruder had to recover from the dive by diving harder had to do with how the control surfaces worked. The crew reported buffeting around 0.96 Mach. This kind of buffeting has the potential to tear apart an aircraft if it isn’t durable enough. Past that speed, the buffeting stopped, but the control surfaces became ineffective.

The ailerons turned up about five degrees at around 0.97 Mach and when it was time to recover from the stunt, the elevator and stabilator couldn’t overcome the high speeds, either. But that makes sense. Again, the aircraft wasn’t really designed for this.

The DC-8 hit Mach 1.012 at 41,088 feet, or 660.6 mph for that given altitude. Now, that sounds like a lot of altitude to pull out of the dive. However, they were flying so fast that Magruder had about a minute to pull out of the dive before the aircraft either impacted the desert or tore itself apart.

Magruder’s fix for the non-responsive controls was unconventional. He pushed the yoke further forward, steepening the dive. This had the effect of lowering the load enough on the horizontal tailplanes for their motors to run, finally allowing the aircraft to pull out of the dive with about 35,000 feet to spare.

In the end, the team did it. They were the first to take a commercial airliner to supersonic speed, and achieved the feat a full year before France and England had even signed their treaty to jointly develop what became the world’s first supersonic transport, the Concorde. Along the way, they also managed to set an altitude record and a payload record. Magruder was also right that Boeing either didn’t have the cojones to give it a try or didn’t want to be second. I suppose in the long run Boeing is still victorious since it’s still officially around while Douglas technically is not.

As for the plane? Well, its story has a sad ending. N9604Z went on to fly with Canadian Pacific Air Lines registered as CF-CPG for nearly two decades. The airline sold it for scrap in 1980 and the aircraft lived its final days out in Florida in 1981.

Today, this story is a reminder of some of the wilder days of advertising. It wasn’t enough to just market a product. Some people and some companies wanted to make those products do things they were never meant to do. A number of companies are all touting a new supersonic future. Regardless of what happens, none of them will be as cool as the time some guys took a DC-8 supersonic.