Baseball Cap
Object
2024.4.37
Yellow and white baseball cap with a logo reading "1935-1985 50 Years" depicting a DC-3 across the front
This silhouette on the hat may be a familiar sight for those visiting the Yukon Transportation Museum, and highway-drivers in general for that matter! The Douglas DC-3 was a revolutionary plane in how versatile, powerful, simple-to-maintain, easy-to-fly, and long-ranged it was compared to other planes when it was invented over 1938. Capable of carrying passengers (21-32) or freight (up to 6000 lbs/2722 kgs), the DC-3 was among the first aircraft which could take travellers across North America in under three-stops; previous air-transport had been slowed-down due to the frequency of stops. Although it quickly saw usage by airlines in the United States as well as by Royal Dutch Airlines in modern-day Indonesia, the real explosion of numbers came when its home-country joined World War Two. For military-use, it was built under the C-47 and C-53 classifications in Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Oklahoma City, while the Soviet Union licence-built it as the Lisunov Li-2 and even the Japanese Mitsubishi-Kinsei produced is as the L2D Type 0 Transporter (the company’s licence most-certainly expired when war opened with the US, but enforcement lapsed likewise). Upon tallying-up all DC-3s and variant-models made between 1938 and 1950, the final count sat at over 16,000 produced. Predictably, the post-World War Two surplus-sales flooded the global market with these planes, to the extent that over half of all global airline-flights were conducted by DC-3s or variants during the late-1940s. The post-war eruption of airlines and air-routes was largely facilitated by the mass-availability of cheap yet reliable DC-3s to purchase and use, and the plane’s wings parted clouds in all corners, from the Yukon to Patagonia, Mongolia to Hawaii. Many pilots around the globe, even today, can speak to starting their careers behind DC-3s’ yolks, while many mechanics, ground-crew, and air-traffic controllers can speak to repairing, handling, and directing DC-3s. A common sight for members of the air-industry everywhere, there were plenty of reasons to commemorate the DC-3’s 50-year anniversary with a hat in 1988