Frozen DC-4 in the Arctic: Ice Pilots

Tim McGraw wrote:

After being fully fueled, a DC-4 has a useful load of about 9,000 pounds. Fifteen 50-gallon drums of Avgas weigh 4500 pounds. So, that’s 4500 pounds of load left for the pilots, crew, and the generator. This looks like the generator they loaded: 

Cummins 450 kW diesel generator

The Cummins engine alone weighs about 4500 pounds. The DC-4 burns 240 gallons of AvGas per hour. That’s 1400 pounds of fuel gone in one hour of flight time. So the DC-4 weighed less when it picked up the generator than when the DC-4 left Yellowknife.

It’s a rough calculation, but the pilot could have left two 50-gallon drums of AvGas (600 pounds) behind in Yellowknife and taken the heater and small electric generator. One hundred gallons of fuel is less than an hour of flight time.

I can see why Joe was upset. 

The pilot was worried about a fuel cushion when he should have been thinking about the -40C temperatures.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.