Airlines: Starting STOL

Neatly lettered in yellow across a new airstrip that opened last week at New York’s La Guardia Airport gleams the word STOL, an acronym for short takeoff and landing. La Guardia’s STOLPORT, as the 1,095-ft. runway has already been dubbed, is first of its kind in the U.S. to offer commercial airplanes those desirable qualities.

The VIP among expected visitors will be the McDonnell Douglas 188, a stubby, banana-shaped ship with outsized wings. Beginning next month, it will touch down at La Guardia’s STOL runway between hops to landing strips set aside in Boston and Washington for extensive testing in the crowded northeast air corridor.

Sponsoring the seven-week experiment is Eastern Air Lines, which started the hourly shuttle service on the Boston-New York-Washington run 7½ years ago and carried 3.3 million passengers along that route last year. Eastern, as well as federal aviation agencies, hopes the testing will lead to a new form of short-range transportation. “Door-to-door” flights from small airports inside or on the edge of cities would save time and would not interfere with long-and medium-haul operations.

Loaded with Gadgets. There won’t be any passengers aboard the McDonnell Douglas 188—only aviation experts and technicians to assess operating costs, time savings, and the feasibility of flying from existing airports without interfering with other traffic. Smarting under the burden of traffic jams at major airports and the skies above them, airlines and the aviation industry are scrambling for commercially viable STOL planes and the potential $5 billion market they represent.

Over the years, scores of STOL and V/-STOL (for vertical short takeoff and landing) airplanes have been designed and flown in wind tunnels around the world. Only a few have gone into production, and none has shown as much promise as the McDonnell Douglas 188, priced at about $4,000,000, on which Eastern Air Lines is pinning its hopes. The plane, developed by the French Breguet works and originally called Breguet 941, was renamed by its U.S. licensee, the St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas Corp. For the tests, the 188 is being loaded with the latest in electronic gadgets, notably Decca-Omnitrac navigation, which, among other things, can fix the plane’s position and plot alternate flight routes.

The prototype can seat 64, a tremendous advantage over its STOL and V/STOL rivals for interurban hops. The closest runner-up, Germany’s Dornier Skyservant, seats only twelve; other STOL-type planes that have begun to enter the U.S. air-taxi/commuter business, like Canada’s De Havilland Otter and the Helio Courier, have only a fraction of McDonnell Douglas’ payload. Fully loaded, the plane can cruise at 250 m.p.h., land at speeds as slow as 55 m.p.h. on a 500-ft. runway; it can take off within 1,000 ft. (one-seventh the length of La Guardia’s shortest shuttle runway).