Douglas Dolphin

[zswobbie1]

Thanks so much for the seawings link.
You can get lost in there for many hours. What a great site!

[Mick]

Hi Guys,

For those who may be interested, there are a couple of walkarounds and a photo gallery for the Douglas Dolphin on the Seawings website, along with a whole bunch of other floatplanes and amphibious aircraft.
https://www.seawings.co.uk/
Regards,
Stratobat

Great site! Thanks for the link! I haven't even found the Dolphin page et and I can already see that this site is a keeper.

Now I've gotten two excellent reference sites from this thread.

OK, now I've checked it out a bit and I like it as much as I thought I would.

Alas, I'm not surprised that the Dolphin they feature is the one in the Naval Aviation Museum. Since that's the only Dolphin left in the world it could hardly be any other. Sadly, that plane was not representative of the type, being (as noted in some of the sharper posts above) one of the very few (two or three, I think) to be built with the metal wing, and also having been heavily modified during its service life.

We have been stung by that plane even before the wing controversy arose! When we started the project we asked Papi to help with the panel and, not yet knowing how non-stock it is, we referred him to the museum plane. He produced a really beautiful rendition of the cockpit. Only later did we find out that even the cockpit was modified and not representative of Dolphins as built, and when we found better photo references from the olden days, we had to change almost everything but the basic shape of the instrument panel and the windscreen frames.

What happened is that the plane survived WW2 and was heavily modified before it became un-airworthy in 1998 and was donated to the museum. All the museum did was roll the plane inside and slap an un-authentic coat of paint on the wings and tail, presumably using the early blue fuselage Coast Guard livery to save paint because the fuselage was already blue, and never mind that no single-fin Dolphin ever wore that livery. (One reference even says they got the tail stripes backwards, though another one disagrees. I believe they at least got that right.) We shouldn't be surprised. This is the museum that painted their Grumman F3F gray (with yellow wing tops and pre-war markings) even though no pre-camo F3F was ever gray, and there are period color photos showing that very plane resplendent in silver. Bah!

[Stratobat]

Hi Guys,

You're both very welcome.

I came across the Seawings website some time ago whilst looking for walkaround photographs of the Short Sunderland.

Robin, another website you may be interested in, if you have not found it all ready, is Facts About Durban.

- https://www.fad.co.za/ (Contents drop down menu, then Aviation).

Regards,
Stratobat

[normb]

I just want to say that modelers and painters both have captured the essence and flavor of the Dolphin. Congratulations.

The "Douglas Aircraft since 1913" guide info says the aircraft, being low production over a fairly long time, were essentially custom built on order. Some had the plywood covered wings, some had metal wings, some had longer fuselages and different bow shapes. Some had the flaps, some didn't. There were some with a longer wing span. Wing float span-wise locations changed. That's not even considering the different engines used! Or later field mods.

Early production Aero Commanders were the same. Every time we opened one up there would be something different. Factory would say "Oh, yeah...That must be S/N....." Beech Dukes, MU-2s too.

Great job to all! The model and the paint jobs allow us to enjoy a neat airplane.

Thanks
Norm

[Mick]

I just want to say that modelers and painters both have captured the essence and flavor of the Dolphin. Congratulations.
The "Douglas Aircraft since 1913" guide info says the aircraft, being low production over a fairly long time, were essentially custom built on order. Some had the plywood covered wings, some had metal wings, some had longer fuselages and different bow shapes. Some had the flaps, some didn't. There were some with a longer wing span. Wing float span-wise locations changed. That's not even considering the different engines used! Or later field mods.
Early production Aero Commanders were the same. Every time we opened one up there would be something different. Factory would say "Oh, yeah...That must be S/N....." Beech Dukes, MU-2s too.
Great job to all! The model and the paint jobs allow us to enjoy a neat airplane.
Thanks
Norm

Hey Norm,

Yep, it seems that not many Dolphins were alike. Probably only the ones built in the same batches for the services, and those were mostly built in a number of small batches, all different from one another. The Naval services had the plain RD (dash number) and RD-1 through -4, the Army had the C-23, C-26 and C-29 (later renamed OA-3, OA-4 and FP-1) ad there were several civil designations, at least up to Dolphin 6, though nothing as orderly as the later DC- series.

We did quite a bit of head-scratching in the planning stage of the model. We could easily have had almost as many models as skins! First we eliminated things that only a couple of planes had, like the metal wings (only a couple planes, only one of which I painted) and the pointy bow, which only one plane had. That didn't narrow it down much!

We decided to ignore the longer fuselage and wider wing span of some of the later planes because we figured they weren't very different and wouldn't be noticeable on the model in the sim. We thought about ignoring the flaps because not many planes had them. We finally decided to put them on the "later" version model just to make it more different from the "early" version. As it finally worked out, the only thing we felt we could not ignore was the very noticeable difference between the early corrugated triple-fin tail and the later smooth single-fin tail. That difference was just too striking.

We were tempted to make a Wright powerplant with the engine face plates, but both early and later Dolphins had both Wright and P&W engines, so we would've needed two more models for a total of four. And some planes were converted from one type engine to the other during their service lives. Finally we uttered a collective "Bah!" and settled for the two models in the package. As it was we ended up with the two models and three panels, each in versions for both wide angle and standard monitors, and way too many skins.

The panels for the two kinds of monitors comes from David having a wide angle one and me a standard one. Working together got a bit confusing sometimes because of that! The three panel variations are because the Army changed its interior color specs between batches of Dolphins, and the Navy's was different from either of them. (Thank goodness for that - those Army interior color schemes are both ugly!) We could only determine that one civilian Dolphin had Navy cockpit colors; we had to guess that the others did too. But it seems likely that the occasional civil order would have been pulled from a batch in progress, and from a Navy or Coast Guard batch because the colors looked less "military" than the Army cockpits. (And less ugly.)

Yeah, I went overboard on the skins. I tend to do that. I actually painted several more skins than we released, but I culled some from the package because they looked similar to other ones. Even so, I guess the number was rather excessive. Still, they illustrate how a low-production plane like the Dolphin still wore quite a few different color and markings schemes.

We also lost a lot of work because we started out thinking that the plane in the Navair Museum was a good reference. We had to go back and make a lot of changes when better information showed us how non-standard that plane is. Another collective "Bah!" for that!