Originally posted by Devonai
Wow, I've been inside the genuine article and it sure didn't look like you could cram a Jeep in there. I assume there must have been some modifications to the fuselage for that role?
You could have been in one of the original releases of the C-47 (The C47A we have here or more appropriately the C-53 Skytrooper which only had a single jump door) or quite possibly a DC-3 masquerading as a C-47. Or even a DC-2 which to the untrained eye looks very much like a C-47/DC-3.
The most produced version of the C-47 had a double cargo door in the rear left side of the fuselage, with a passenger door nested inside the right half of the cargo door. In a sense, the cargo doors were the aircraft's worst feature. They worked as specified, but since the C-47 was originally designed as a commercial transport, it was not optimized for loading cargo as an aircraft with nose or tail doors would have been. Getting large cargo in and out of a C-47 was time-consuming and frustrating; a jeep could be driven up a ramp into the aircraft, but it had to be manhandled around to fit inside the fuselage.
I would imagine it's because of this that I can only recall seeing one photo of a jeep being offloaded from a C-47.
