The Uiver in flight - KLM's DC-2, winner of
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In 1932 the American airliner TWA forwarded a specification for the design of a commercial aircraft to several American aircraft manufacturers. One of the requirements of this specification was that the plane, fully loaded, must make a satisfactory take-off under good
control at any TWA airport on any combination of two engines (most of the qualifying aircraft during that time were three-engined). The Douglas Aircraft Company, located at Clover Field in Santa Monica, came up with a design that could meet the TWA requirements. On July 1st 1933 the Douglas DC-1 made its first successful flight. TWA evaluated the DC-1 and additional requirements resulted in the DC-2, which made its maiden flight on May 11th 1934 and of which 108 were produced.
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A further improvement resulted in the DC-3, which became the most successful of the series, the famous Dakota. The DC3's first flight was made on December 17th 1935, and Dakotas are still in commercial use all over the world today. The first DC-2 was introduced at KLM in 1934; it carried the name Uiver (Stork) and was registered as PH-AJU. It was this aircraft that became famous as the KLM entry in the MacRobertson Trophy race, arriving second behind the Grosvenor House Comet. In memory of the race, one of the last still airworthy DC-2s, painted in the PH-AJU colours, made a second flight to Melbourne in 1984. The original Uiver, unfortunately, crashed in bad weather over Iraq just months after its racing triumph. • There is also a tribute to the Uiver in Australia, including a pole-mounted replica of the aeroplane and a series of wall-mounted plaques recording the DC-2's participation in the race. See http://uiverfoundation.org/
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Uiver flies again - the 1984
The replica Uiver these days has its own hangar with a museum display about the MacRobertson Trophy race
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For more information on the KLM DC-2 and DC-3 fleet, go to www.xs4all.nl/~dda/UK/, from where these pictures have been 'borrowed' and the information abstracted.
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