The New Workhorse?

In Seattle, Boeing Aircraft bustled with good news. Hit hardest of all by V-J day cancellations, it was on the way to health with its first big postwar plane order. Pan American Airways ordered 20 of Boeing's 80-passenger Stratocruisers, peacetime version of the 6-29, at a cost of around $1,000,000 apiece. Boeing, now making ten of these ships for the Army, hopes to start delivering them to Pan Am by next November. With them, Pan Am expects to fly nonstop from New York to London in eleven and a half hours.

The Mixmaster. Planemaker Donald Douglas' Santa Monica plant was also abustle. The U.S. Army was ready to take the wraps off its sleek but weird-looking new light bomber, the XB-42 (see cut). What gave it the weird look were two propellers, rotating in opposite directions, behind the tail. What made it important to Douglas was that it is the military prototype of his DC-8 (the Skybus), his chief hope for a profitable postwar future. The XB-42 (facetiously dubbed the "Mix-master") is in the 4Oo-m.p.h. class. The DC-8 will be slower, cruising at 270 m.p.h., and slightly bigger.

Like the XB-42, it will be powered by two Allison engines in the front of the fuselage, driving the propellers by shafts extending the length of the plane. In the Skybus, Douglas expects to carry 48 passengers at the record low operating rate of 7^ a ton-mile. Soon Douglas expects to start taking orders for his Skybus. He hopes to start delivering them within a year, have them take the place of his famed workhorse, the DC-3.

The 202. In this, Douglas may get his toughest competition from natty, ministerial Glenn Martin, president of the

Glenn L. Martin Co. Martin had his own plane to replace the DC-3: a two-motored, 270-m.p.h. Martin 202. Last week, he sold Eastern Air Lines 50 Martin 2025, the second big postwar contract for Martin. (He sold 35 planes fortnight ago to Pennsylvania Central Airlines.) Martin looks down his nose at Douglas' weird new plane. But there is one catch to his own fat contracts. His 202 is still on the drawing board, will not be ready for delivery until 1947.

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