A Whangpoo lighter brings the center section of CNAC's first DC-2 upriver to Lunghwa Airport, spring, 1935 (Edward P. Howard collection)
The DC-2 had none of the criss-cross mishmash of struts and spars that had knit together previous generations of aircraft, not a single one. Something about the sleek lines of the all-metal, low-winged monoplane inspired confidence. It looked like an airplane was supposed to look, and the airline used the DC-2′s arrival to launch a marketing campaign spotlighting the prestige a person won using airmail and traveling by plane, a very successful selling point in face-conscious China. Within 90 days, passenger traffic had increased three-hundred percent.
The DC-2's center section comes ashore (Edward P. Howard collection)
It’s worth noting that the DC-2 had to be brought from the Douglas factory in Santa Monica on a ship. At the time, the Pacific was only flown as one-off stunts by pioneering pilots. The ocean wouldn’t be crossed commercially, on a schedule, until Pan Am started doing it in November of 1935 using massive M-130 flying boats to span a string of mid-Pacific islands, one leg per day (San Francisco to Hawaii, Hawaii to Midway, Midway to Wake, Wake to Guam, Guam to Manila).
