Transport: Flying Freight Car

Last week Mr. Charles Harding Babb of Glendale, Calif., who is the world's busiest jobber in new and used sport, military and transport planes, decided to go into the heavy freight plane production business. That nobody ever had done so before was no deterrent to Charlie Babb.

Annually for the past five years Charles Babb has sold between $500,000 and $1,000,000 worth of airplanes and airplane equipment, largely to clients in Alaska, Mexico, Central and South America. His smallest sale was his first, a $700 reconditioned and guaranteed Eaglerock three-seater. His largest: $400,000 worth of assorted ships for export to France in 1936, intended, he guesses, for Loyalist Spain. As sidelines he rents ships to Hollywood cinema studios, runs a skywriting business, operates the Ryan and Stinson agencies for Central and South America.

Charlie Babb got this idea for a flying freight car from the demands of Latin-American customers serving mines, lumber camps and industries in localities accessible only by air. Most of these use giant Curtiss Condors rebuilt as cargo ships. Now busy refitting six Condors to carry mahogany logs out of Yucatan's wilds, Babb hit on the idea of a unique Babb Special. It will have a wing span of 100 feet, twin motors and a cruising speed of 135 m.p.h. Its cargo space will be 35 feet long, 8½ feet wide, 9 feet deep. Through a hatch in the nose 4,000-lb. tractors or standard army dump trucks may be driven right aboard. Depending on the fuel requirements, the Babb Special's payload capacity is reckoned at from 8,000 to 10,000 Ibs., more than a Douglas DC-3 passenger transport. But a DC-3 costs $114,000. The Babb Special, which will be built in Babb's own plant, is to sell for from $35,000 to $40,000.