FOKKER F-10 NC8047

 

Fokker F-10 NC8047, January 28, 1930, Los Angeles, CA (Source: HDL)

 

The stately Fokker F-10, and its big brother the F-10A were familiar sights on the West Coast of the U.S. from the late 1920s to early 1930s. Many were operated by Western Air Express (WAE), Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), Transcontinental & Western Airlines (T.W.A.) and other early airlines.

Fokker NC8047, an F-10, S/N 1006, is signed in the Grand Central Air Terminal (GCAT) Register over 40 times between April and July, 1931. Two of the landings, on April 29 and June 27, 1931 were identified as "Test hops" by tower Operator A.J. Lygum.

The photographs, right and below, are courtesy of the Huntington Digital Library. It shows NC8047 on the ground at an unidentified location in Los Angeles, on what appears to be an overcast January 28, 1930. It wears early Transcontinental & Western Airlines livery. As it sits, it is a model F-10. Some F-10s were later modified to F-10A by the addition of tail wheels and other speed and comfort options. NC8047 in this photo has its original tail skid.

Fokker F-10 NC8047, January 28, 1930, Los Angeles, CA (Source: HDL)

 

Fokker F-10 NC8047, April 16, 1930, Los Angeles, CA (Source: HDL)

Nine of the citations in the Grand Central Air Terminal (GCAT) Register reflect its job as a workhorse passenger and freight transporter. It flew the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. The tower Operator identified the owner at each landing as "T.W.A."

That NC8047 was part of a scheduled airline is clearly illustrated by GCAT Register entries. Specifically, the Register notations from July 1 to July 5, 1931 show surprisingly punctual arrivals and departures for NC8047 to and from San Francisco. To illustrate, I have extracted a few columns from my online datebase for those landings. They are tabulated below.

T.W.A. Scheduled Service for Fokker NC8047, July 1-July 5, 1931 (Source: Webmaster)

 

The database is the same one that delivers to you information when you click the dropdown menus above, right. The first column of the table, at far left, signifies the arrived-from (origin) city. The last column at far right is the destination.

Note the clear arrival timings near 1:00PM from San Francisco for July 1-3, and the departures to San Francisco about 4.5 hours later.

The July 4-5 flights were split, with an evening arrival at 8:31 and a morning departure on the 5th. It is not apparent if this was because of a delay in the flight leaving San Francisco on the 4th, or if this was a special flight added in support of Independence Day travel. Regardless, this punctuality would be the envy of some 21st century airlines. Other examples, with more or less the same levels of punctuality, are seen in the database for other GCAT airliners.

The fact is, many of these very early scheduled airlines maintained laudable timetables. Another example is Standard Air Lines, actually a T.W.A. parent, which flew the route Los Angeles-Phoenix-Tucson-Douglas-El Paso and return during the late 1920s. At the link (PDF 671kB) you will find an analysis of business productivity and efficiency factors, including punctuality, for Standard Air Lines as reflected in arrival and departure data at Tucson, AZ. The published data were extracted from the Davis-Monthan Airfield Register.

As was the rule, rather than the exception, pilot names were seldom entered in the GCAT Register by the tower Operator. None were entered for the landings by NC8047. Points of origin or destinations were not supplied for some of the flights. And only the June 27th landing recorded the number of passengers carried (3; and NC8047 was a 14-place airplane). This shortcoming of the GCAT Register is overcome by the fact that most of the aircraft were identified by registration number, at least making it easier to research individual aircraft.

Among our suite of Register Web sites, NC8047 landed only at GCAT. It is not found in any other Register. All totaled in the GCAT Register, between December, 1930 and July, 1931, there were 78 visits by 14 individually registered Fokker F-10 models.

According to this REFERENCE, page 146, the F-10 type was first put into service on the west coast by WAE on May 26, 1928 on its Los Angeles to San Francisco route. I'm not sure exactly when NC8047 was acquired by WAE, but it wasn't the first. The first F-10 acquired by WAE was NX5170. We find NX5170 landing at Tucson, AZ on May 21, 1928, westbound from El Paso, TX to Los Angeles. Five passengers were carried, including well-known journalist Florabel Muir. This flight could have been the ferry flight of the new airplane from where it was manufactured in New Jersey to the west coast (compare the flight date with the first use of the F-10 model).

But I digress, in mid-1931, NC8047 was transferred to Eastern Airlines (EAL) and used by EAL until it was replaced by a more modern Curtiss airplane. I do not know its fate after its service with Eastern.

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THIS PAGE UPLOADED: 01/27/16 REVISED: 05/09/16