Of all the airplanes that populate the canon of aviation history it seems to me that one is of particular importance; not merely for its impact on transportation, society, and the military, but also for its contribution to the development of modern aesthetics.

That airplane is the Douglas DC-3.

The Birth of the Douglas DC-3

If you’re an aviation buff, you are probably already aware that the Douglas DC-3 was, in many respect, the product of accident and happenstance.

On 31 March 1931 Transcontinental and Western Airlines (TWA) flight 599 crashed near the town of Bazaar, KS while en route from Kansas City, MO to Los Angeles, CA. The downing of the Fokker Trimotor would have likely remained a historical “un-event” had it not been for the fact that legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne was numbered among the nine passengers and crew who died when the plane went down.

Rockne’s death demanded answers.

Initially, authorities and aviation journalists speculated that the plane had come apart shortly after take-off owing to strong turbulence and icing produced by a thunderstorm. Further examination, however, revealed that this could not have been the case. Meteorological records indicated that there had been no thunderstorm cells or other atmospheric disturbances in the area. A long, thorough, and very public subsequent investigation concluded that the airplane had broken up in clear weather due to fatigue cracks in its cantilever stressed-plywood wings. The resulting public outrage lead the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce to ground all Fokker Trimotors operating in American airspace. (Later the ban was lifted, though the planes were thereafter restricted to flying mail routes only.)

The Commerce Department’s ruling effectively grounded TWA’s fleet. If the company was to remain in business, it would have to find a replacement aircraft, preferably one that would reassure a public increasingly concerned about the safety of wooden planes. The obvious candidate was the new Boeing 247 currently under development. An all-metal aircraft incorporating advanced design features, the 247 represented the state of the art of aircraft design when it debuted in the early spring of 1933. By the time it entered full production in 1934, the latest version (the 247D) was considered to be the most advanced passenger plane in existence.

Unfortunately for TWA, the new 247 was unavailable for purchase. Another airline, United Airways (member of a larger conglomerate that included Boeing as one of its subsidiaries) already held purchase options on all of the aircraft slated to be built in the first year of production. Desperate to counter the advantage that would be enjoyed by their rivals at United, officials at TWA contacted the Douglas Aircraft Company to commission a new design that might challenge the technically advanced new Boeing. In no time, Douglas engineers developed the DC-1 — the platform of what would eventually become one of history’s most important airplanes, the DC-3.

Like rival Boeing’s 247, the final version of the all-metal stress-skinned Douglas monoplane (the DC-3) incorporated a wide array of new technologies and construction techniques such as advanced engine cowlings, variable pitch propellers, and a retractable under carriage that improved airflow around the aircraft and, thus, reduced drag. These “streamlining” measures enabled the airplane to travel farther and faster with larger loads while consuming far less fuel than less advanced aircraft. But the DC-3 also added important new features not found on the 247. These included more efficient wings, wing flaps, and a spacious cabin incorporating the latest innovations in soundproofing. Perhaps most importantly, the longer and wider DC-3 could seat up to twice as many passengers (21) as the Boeing 247.

The result was a far more comfortable, efficient, and cost effective airplane. The DC-3 promised to lower seat-mile costs by as much as 1/3 to 1/2 that of comparable aircraft. Indeed, the beginning of American Airline’s DC-3 service between NY and Chicago in July 1936 marked the first time in aviation history that an aviation company turned a profit by transporting passengers alone. By the end of 1938 DC-3s comprised nearly 80% of U.S. airliners’ fleets and had become standard equipment for nearly two-dozen carriers around the world.¹ Meanwhile, the Boeing 247 had gone from cutting edge prototype to obsolete also-ran.

The Streamlined Decade

The Douglas DC-3 was more than just a technically advanced and cost-effective aircraft. It was (and is) also strikingly beautiful. Characterized by sleek, flowing lines and its highly polished aluminum surfaces, the DC-3 (even seven decades after its debut!) evokes sensations of power, speed, and dynamism. The design features that made the DC-3 the most aerodynamically efficient aircraft produced to date were a near perfect union of form and function. The result was not merely an economic and profitable aircraft, but one that managed to capture and epitomize an emerging new aesthetic that quickly became synonymous with the “look” of the modern.

As Donald J. Bush described in his study of industrial design, The Streamlined Decade, this new aesthetic was indebted to principles that had emerged from the science of aerodynamics. Attracted to the simple beauty of sleek forms that offered the least resistance while in motion and eager to be associated with the most powerful symbols of industrial modernity, artists, architects, and designers of the 1930s turned to transportation technologies in search of inspiration. They found that inspiration in the flowing lines, clean surfaces, and polished metals used to improve the aerodynamic performance of trains, automobiles, and (of course) airplanes.

That the aerodynamic aesthetic increasingly favored by leading designers ultimately influenced popular tastes came as a result of the economic realities facing business and industry. Seeking any and every advantage they could find to entice consumers in the midst of America’s ongoing economic Depression, manufacturers turned to artists and industrial designers to “update” the packaging of their products. Very quickly “streamliners” like Norman Bel Geddes, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Robert Heller began encasing ordinary items within contoured shells notionally based on the principle of “minimum drag.” These forms lent themselves to mechanized mass-production processes and new materials such as plastics. Meanwhile, streamlining lent style and glamor to the most mundane domestic products. It transformed everyday items like telephones, fans, and pencil sharpeners into objects of futuristic beauty.

Of course, “streamlined” design had little to do with improving performance. The outward appearance of these implements had no effect on how efficiently they performed their duties. “Less wind resistant” toasters didn’t make faster toast, nor did stylized cocktail sets make more aerodynamic martinis. The streamlined aesthetic was intended for symbolic and decorative purposes. It aimed to stimulate consumption rather than enhance function.

The connection between aviation and industrial design soon came full circle as the era’s most celebrated “streamliners” began applying their air-minded visions to airplanes as well. Although best-known for his fanciful “Air Liner #4” (1929) — a “plane of the future” that he hoped would begin carrying passengers on transatlantic flights by the 1940s — Bel Geddes also transformed existing airplanes as one of the first designers hired to refashion commercial aircraft cabins. Following the end of WWII, Teague was likewise called upon to design the open, spacious, and clean-lined interior of the Boeing 377 Stratocrusier. These efforts ensured that the stylistic revolution produced by aerodynamic streamlining would apply as much to planes’ interior spaces as their external forms.

Embodied in the engineering principles that shaped the era’s most iconic airplane, the DC-3, the “streamlined decade” profoundly influenced the look of “the modern.” Today, the aesthetic revolution launched in the 1930s remains an integral part of our everyday lives. From the smooth flowing silhouettes of razors and deodorant bottles to the highly stylized plastic cases that protect computer circuitry, the “streamline decade” continues to shape (literally) industrial design.

Nota Bene: The Aesthetic Revolution that Wasn’t

Although the “streamline revolution” embodied in the DC-3 profoundly influenced the manner in which pre-WWII American and European citizens envisioned the modern, it had little, if any, impact on Soviet aesthetics. While American and European perspective were being shaped by the “aerodynamic” creations of Bel Geddes, Teague, and others, Soviet artists and designers were being forced to sacrifice aesthetic innovation in favor of crude, monotonous, and bland forms that better served the Party’s fetish of increasing output norms.

Officially, the new mandate of “socialist realism” in 1932 imposed creative conformity across all fields of the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and design (as well as literature and music) were expected to adhere to the vision and principles of the Communist Party. According to this politically correct vision, artists’ work was expected to portray daily life “in its revolutionary development.” All productions were required to combine “truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic depiction” with “the task of ideological transformation.” The goal was the creation of art embodying a “revolutionary romanticism” that would remodel and re-educate the working masses in the spirit of socialism.

Transparent allegory and simplistic plot structures dominated literature. Highly stylized realism shaped painting and sculpture. Meanwhile, in architecture, designs of the thirties borrowed heavily from classical structures and motifs. (It’s one of the ironies of modern Russian history that the Soviet “world of tomorrow” produced an aesthetic vision so deeply rooted in the past.) The result was bulky, ponderous, and predictable structures built on an increasingly grand scale.

None of this is to say that Soviet aircraft failed to incorporate the technological advances that led to more aerodynamic and efficient designs. They did…thanks to the willingness of America’s Depression-era airplane manufacturers to sell their most advanced concepts to the highest foreign bidders. In July 1936, less than seven months after the debut of the DC-3, Soviet officials contracted with the Douglas Company for the purchase of one of the planes and a license to produce a native version. The domestically built aircraft, ultimately designated the Lisunov Li-2, debuted in 1939. The Li-2 would play a vital role as the Soviet air force’s most important transport aircraft. In the post-war world, it continued to provide service as the country’s chief civilian airliner. However, unlike in the West, the plane inspired no visions of tomorrow. That task had already been fulfilled by the Communist Party.

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1. Tom D. Crouch, Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age. W. W. Norton: New York, 2003, p. 335

to build the Tower, full size from steel girders and guy wires. It will be built in sections, in different venues and locations around the world until the whole Tower has been fabricated. The sections will not be united, but the Tower will exist in the world.

“Tatlin’s Tower and the World” is less interesting as an artistic “statement” than it is as evidence of the enduring legacy of one of twentieth-century Russia’s most visionary and inspiring artists, Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) a painter, sculptor, an architect who founded the avant-garde movement known as “Constructivism.”

“Tatlin’s Tower” (or, more properly, the “Monument to the Third International”) has been an object of curiosity, speculation, and inspiration since its architectural model was first unveiled in 1920. The visually striking new structure was intended to serve as the main headquarters for the International Workers’ Movement. “Tatlin’s Tower” was to rank among the greatest of the world’s architectural wonders once completed.

Encased inside double helix of iron and steel thrusting toward the heavens at an angle [photo], the core of the Tower would consist of three glass and steel building units shaped, from base to top, in the forms of a cube (for legislative assemblies), a pyramid (executive bodies), and a cylinder (information and propaganda services). Standing more than 1,300 feet tall, the edifice would have dwarfed the great monument to the French Revolution completed in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel. Moreover, unlike Eiffel’s static tower in Paris, Tatlin’s Monument would not stand still. Its three central units would mark the passage of time by revolving at different speeds: the cube rotating yearly, the pyramid monthly, and the cylinder daily. Meanwhile, the very top of the Tower would be equipped with a lighting apparatus capable of projecting messages and revolutionary slogans onto a giant screen (or, the clouds passing overhead).

In short, “Tatlin’s Tower” was every bit as grandiose, ambitious, and impossible to build as the proletarian paradise that it was intended to honor.

Aside from having produced one of the twentieth-century’s most enduring avant-garde architectural images with his “Tower,” Vladimir Tatlin is significant for having designed a second, no less impractical and marvelous device: a human-powered flying machine that he christened the “Letatlin.”

A play on the artist’s surname and the Russian verb “to fly” (letat’), the Letatlin was assembled during a period (1930-1932) when Tatlin’s Constructivist approach to art and architecture had fallen into disfavor with Communist Party officials. By the time that the full-scale model for the Letatlin was complete in 1932 the Stalinist assault on Soviet culture and the arts was beginning in earnest. That same year, Josef Stalin promulgated a decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations” which banned all independent studios, workshops, and groups. In their place the Party established official artistic and creative “unions” — bureaucratic mechanisms that would enable the Party to control artistic content and production throughout the country.

The Party also moved to impose an official style known as “socialist realism,” an artistic orthodoxy in which everything was portrayed as it was supposed to according to Stalinist ideology: the workers were enthusiastic about their tasks, the enemy vicious, cowardly and ever-present; and the Party always victorious. Irony, contradiction, and un-scripted conflict all were eradicated in favor of a grand “master narrative” that comported with the Party’s prevailing worldview.

Visually, the Letatlin is very much reminiscent of the ornithopter drawings that appear in the late 15th-early 16th century sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The similarities between the Letatlin and da Vinci’s ornithopter don’t end there. Both expressed an understanding of and approach to human flight rooted in a desire for personal freedom and transcendence. In the case of da Vinci, such longings were very much in tune with the emergent humanistic and individualistic worldview that evolved with the Renaissance. In the case of Tatlin, they represented sharply dissonant views that ran dangerously counter to the increasingly repressive and collectivist-minded political culture of the Stalinist 1930s.

The guardians of the politically correct Stalinist orthodoxy doubtless saw the Letatlin for what it was: a subversive statement regarding the need to liberate flight (and, by extension, the individual) from the mechanistic, industrial, and de-humanizing constraints that had come to dominate Soviet culture, society, and politics.

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