British DC3's

British Dakotas

I can’t comment on the very early (impressed civilian) Dakotas in RAF service, but the standard Dakota 111 & 1V (C-47A & C-47B) allocated to the RAF appear to have been delivered with full US produced instrumentation & radio equipment. After delivery, there were upgrades to bring it up to the then current operational specification (I believe most of it was carried out at Prestwick, with some work being carried out in the US) prior to squadron allocation.

The RAF Dakota pilots notes have a photo section at the rear & the only deviation I can see from a standard USAAF example is an adaptor at each headset / microphone point to enable the RAF single plug equipment to be used. The oxygen, radio & instrumentation is all standard USAAF. The wartime C-47 parts manuals, flight handbooks, maintenance manuals, etc all state that they apply to the RAF Dakota 11, 111, etc & there is no mention of any alternative equipment fit, etc.

I have examples of USAAF instrumentation which have RAF stores tags. These tags carry both the original US part number & an RAF part number. It would have been difficult (& a bit pointless) to exchange the US instruments for UK produced ones (& thats not to say that an UK produced equivilant was ever produced?).

With regard to post war Dakotas, most ex-RAF examples appear to have been processed through Scottish Aviation at Prestwick & I would imagine much of the wartime operational equipment would have been removed as redundant. I’ve no idea what would have been fitted in the radio operators position, but the instrumentation would have been retained & upgaded progressively from then on.

Some DC-3s in civilian use post war carried a Radio / Wireless Operator. I have two accident reports, one of the crews had a certified wireless operator the other didn’t, though there was 12 years between the two accidents.

The report for the first accident, BEA DC-3 G-AHCY (crashed 1949) listed the following radio equipment.
M/F – H/F W/T transmitting and receiving equipment.
V.H.F. R/T transmitting and receiving equipment.
GEE Radio position finding apparatus.
S.B.A. equipment.

The SBA was declared R1466 and R1125D, as the aircraft was ex-RAF and had been overhauled in the UK the WT / RT equipment was probably of British origin, T1154 R1155 and TR1143A.

The other aircraft was G-AMVC (crashed 1961) and that was fitted with pilot operated radio equipment. It was also fitted with an Automatic Direction Finder, ILS and Decca Mk.10.