Bouquet for The Three

THE DC-3 by Carroll V. Gines and Wendell F. Moseley. 203 pages. Lippincott. $5.50.

"A distinct personality, a warmth. Dependable, forgiving, attentive, gracious and benevolent." What sounds like a paraphrase of the Boy Scout oath is the authors' sentimental tribute to an airplane, the DC-3, the twin-engine, 190 m.p.h. prop-driven craft that first flew 30 years ago and has entered Valhalla under its own power. Of the 10,000 built from 1936 to 1946, some 5,000 are still in the air, faithfully serving 174 airlines in 70 countries. In the heart of the jet age, the DC-3 still accounts for nearly one-third of the world's air-transport fleet. It has always thrived on abuse. Designed for 21 passengers, it has carried as many as 72. During the 1948 Berlin airlift, one set down on the runway with 13,500 lbs. of steel beams --twice the safe maximum load--blowing all three tires. The authors, both U.S. Air Force officers, have also overloaded their favorite plane with a lot of World War II heroics. But their love is palpable--the book itself is a retool job on an earlier book published in 1959--and the DC-3's legend is durable enough to warrant it. One Air Force model, having crash-landed on an ice island off Alaska five years ago, still stands there, a monument on a 30-foot pedestal of ice (see cut). In 1946, a DC-3 flew into a Swiss Alp, inflicting minor injury on itself and passengers, who disembarked. Thereupon, the plane sank out of sight into a glacier's soft snow. The thrifty Swiss calculate that the glacier, moving ponderously down the mountain, will discharge its cold-frozen possession six centuries hence--presumably in flyable condition.

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