F-27 promo video

[Dennis the menace]

Here's Arthur Godfrey to tell you all about the new Fairchild F-27.

This is the first time I have ever seen an airliner with white sidewall tires on it. Just think how nice it would have been to see whitewall tires on propliners and early jets!  Also, that is the classiest yellow tractor with fenders and wide white sidewall tires on it that I have ever seen (1:30).

[Erik]

Dutch pride overseas - not claiming the tractor.
My first ever flight was as a passenger on a (Fokker) F27 scenic flight over the so called Delta Works around 1970. I did need the bag but I was hooked on aviation forever!

Erik

[Bjoern]

The F-27 was an ingenious design and arrived at just the right time.

[biggiraffe]

Pretty cool! But what is the reason that Fokker was never mentioned, instead talking as though the F-27 is an American design? Was there a lot of sentiment against buying from overseas back then?
Kurt

[Tom/CalClassic]

I'm sure they were trying to make it sound like a completely new design, and not just a plane built for license from someone else. Just marketing.

[Dennis the menace]

Jul 13, 2019 18:42:16 GMT -5 biggiraffe said:

Pretty cool! But what is the reason that Fokker was never mentioned, instead talking as though the F-27 is an American design? Was there a lot of sentiment against buying from overseas back then?
Kurt

Maybe this might explain some of that -

Quite a lot of Americans in the postwar 1945 to 1975 era considered anything "foreign" to be inferior and unsafe.  This went from cars to airplanes.  Things such as cameras, shoes, suits, luggage, appliances etc, etc, were also considered to be inferior.

I personally remember relatives saying "Oh, I'm not getting on any foreign thing" or "My God, you'll take your life in your hands on that - its foreign".  People were even reluctant to travel on a foreign airline that used American built equipment. "Oh, those pilots must not be very good, they're foreign"....that sort of thing.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Americans who drove foreign cars (mostly hip, single, younger, college educated white males living on the East or West coast in cities) were considered by most Americans - especially those in the Midwest and the South - to be eccentric, oddballs, or rich snobs.  By rejecting American built cars, many Americans took it as a personal insult to "patriotism" and a snub to American products, and by association, everything American in general.  The average Ameriacan looked at them with a bit of distrust, as if they were not real "patriots, or loyal Americans".  In Hollywood, it was always the spy, the double crosser, the traitor who drove a foreign car.  It was always the nutty, ivy league college prof who drove one - the "lefty" interlectual that you just couldn't quite totally trust. Disney movies were infamous as showing nutty collegiate students and faculty driving British cars. Society in general believed that those guys bought "the other countries products.  That "Us vs. Them" mentality was just as strong back then as it was today, it just made itself known in different ways - none of which are good.

All that really began to change starting in California in the early 1970s with Japanese cars.  The gas crises caused many people to give a Japanese car a try, and many of them were hooked. By 1980, it had become "cool" to drive a Japanese car.  It was the hip, smart, thoughtful thing to do. By the late 1980s, that anti foreign sentiment was for the most part gone (at least out west, anyway, that I know of).

Now the opposite has happened, anything foreign (except for Made in China products) is considered better built than American products, and many people will choose a foreign product over a domestic product.  IKEA is notorious for playing this up, making most everything in China, but giving it a false, made up "Euro sounding" name.  Just foreign sounding enough to make Americans think it has value, but not TOO foreign so it scares them off from buying it.

But there is this "fear" with many Americans who live in "flyover territory" and rural areas of the USA of anything that is somehow perceived as "different".  I clearly remember when I was flying to Europe in the mid '80s on KLM and SAS and Lufthansa, people saying "Why don't you fly Pan Am, its so much safer" and "I just don't understand why you would want to fly some foreign carrier?".  Things like that.  Even in the mid 2000s, when I was flying to Costa Rica on Aero Peru, LACSA, and TACA, people were still making comments "That South American stuff, its not safe.  Those pilots probably never had an real training.  The planes are unsafe, the food is bad, its unsanitary, etc,......"  on and on and on and on it went.

That's most likely the reason the film stresses how American the aircraft is.  So that the airline companies wouldn't get scared at the thought of a "Dutch" product, or have to worry about passengers canceling their reservations once they found out "the plane was foreign".

Its all part of that American provincialism that I never understood (nor wanted to understand) and tried my best to avoid being around or being part of.  I was always a rebel, kind of a lone wolf, a free thinker.  From an early age I always distrusted people who too easily just accepted whatever they were told to believe, marched however they were told to march, and who fell into this "pack mentality".

[jagdflieger]

My first flight on an F27 was in Australia, while on R&R from VN. It was a most enjoyable flight from Sydney to Bathurst.

[Erik]

That's your second interesting essay this week Mike, thanks for the insights!

And glad you're willing to spend time on them in stead of, let's say, keeping up with the Kardashians.

Erik

[jymp]

And still no commercial developer has released a FSX/P3D Fairchild version of this bird.

[biggiraffe]

I never got to fly on an F-27 but saw them operating with Hughes Airwest and Swift Aire.

Interesting reminder of the prevailing view of foreign products long ago -- I do think I recall that from my childhood days. That would sure explain why it's totally "Fairchild" in the film (back then it was film, right?).

Thanks!
Kurt

[Dennis the menace]

Jul 14, 2019 18:40:34 GMT -5 biggiraffe said:

I never got to fly on an F-27 but saw them operating with Hughes Airwest and Swift Aire.

Interesting reminder of the prevailing view of foreign products long ago -- I do think I recall that from my childhood days. That would sure explain why it's totally "Fairchild" in the film (back then it was film, right?).

Thanks!
Kurt

That old American attitude about foreign things was the reason that the first Nissans sold in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s were called "Datsun".  The company hired a PR firm and they informed Nissan that Americans would not warmly receive anything that sounded "too Japanese" (WWII had just ended a little over 20 years ago, and anti-Japanese attitudes were very strong at the time).  Nissan executives were told that "Nissan" sounded too much like Nisei, the second born generation of Japanese Americans who were put into concentration camps from 1942 to 1945 and produced negative reactions among potential American buyers.  So they came up with the name Datsun, instead. This lasted until the mid 1980s.

An interesting story about Datsun, and marketing failure.  Nissan wanted to get into the sports car market in the United States, so they produced a sports car.  They spent several years researching exactly what American buyers (especially young college grad males) wanted in a sports car.  It was introduced into Japan first, and was a huge hit over there.  It had style, handling, speed, power, a sporty cockpit, yet was economical to run.  In other words it had everything all the research data said the American buyer wanted in a sports car.  So it was released in the USA for sale in 1969.  And then something happened.  Nobody bought any.  Most of them were sitting unsold on dealer's lots.  Sure, a few middle aged women bought them, and a handful of men, but nobody else.  Management was dumbfounded.  At this point in time, there was no Nissan management in the USA, it was all located in Japan and all the senior managers were Japanese, many of which had never even been to the USA before. The Japanese did not understand how Americans think, and especially didn't understand the young male American mindset. Finally, after still not finding out what the problem was, they hired an American PR firm who quickly figured out what the problem was.  It was the name of the car.  When the sportscar was unveiled in Japan the year earlier, the CEO of Nissan was asked by the Japanese press, what is the name of this new car? He said "I will name it after my favorite musical play - "My Fair Lady".  And thus, it was called the Datsun Fairlady.  The Japanese loved it (its still sold as the Fairlady in Japan), but they did not realize that no young American male, especially a single male, and prone to buying sports cars, wanted to be seen driving anything called a "Fairlady".  That is date death, pick up poison.  It brands you for life among your peers, makes you the object of scorn and ridicule, and worse, women might laugh at you when you pull up in such a thing.  So, a quick name change and the car then became a success.  It was named the Datsun 240Z, because it had a 2.4 liter engine and the Z is short for the Japanese word for lightening.  Chevrolet had this happen a decade later with its popular Chevy II Nova car, it was not selling in Mexico or South America at all.  Turns out, "Nova" in Spanish means "It doesn't go".  Midwest drugstore chain Osco bought California Sav-on drug stores and changed the name to Osco, and then promptly lost half of its business.  Maybe "Osco" works fine in Iowa, but in the Hispanic southwest of the USA "Osco" means vomit.  Not exactly the place you want to buy medications or ice cream at!  Same for the Braniff lavender 707.  Pilots refused to fly it, many were ex military and thought it was too gay, and Latins would not board it because in Mexico, lavender is the color of the "witch moth" which is associated with bad luck, death and funerals and mourning.  So after just one month, they repainted it (to tan, I believe).

When I was growing up in Southern California in the late '60s and early '70s, there was a common rumor going around all over the place that because people were refusing to buy products that had a "Made in Japan" label on them, an industrial city in Japan named Oita changed its name to Usa.  Then all products made in the city of Usa, had a "Made in USA" label stuck to them in order to fool people into thinking that they were actually made in the United States of America, when in fact they were actually made in Oita, Japan.

I never got to fly in an F-27.  I wish I had of.  The cabin looks nice, the seats comfy, and those windows can't be beat.  With that high wing, there is no "bad seat" to be had.  Every seat has a great view.  Usually with turboprops, they try to put something in the cabin that meets the propeller plane, like lavatories, or a galley, or even coat closets because the propwash can be very loud, and the fact ice can be thrown from the prop tips to the fuselage.  I looks like there was the front seats there on the F-27.  Must have been loud!

[qxtoolman]

The F-27 was Horizon's First type of Aircraft. In fact we now have a Q400 painted in that Original Paint Scheme. Also we have a model of one in the upper lobby of the Ops Center. So it is piece of History for Us at ole QX. Also the first vehicle I had in the Air Force, was 59 VW Beetle bug, and was not allowed to bring home on leave. Oh the sacrilege! Bringing a car that was not Detroit Iron to the Michigan Farm.....
Stefan

[Bjoern]

Up until doing the FSX models of Berlie's FS9 one, I had never realized that the Mark 500 and the FH-227 had different fuselage lengths. Imagine my frustration of having to cater to two different models with different fuselage textures.


If somebody has 3ds Max (version 9+), I still have files looking for a caretaker of an unfinished upgrade of the cockpit to eliminate some artifacts introduced by the original conversion from FSDS format.

[Pacific SMX]

Kurt, I remember Swift Air as well! It was quite a bit of hoopla when Swift Air made the decision to purchase them. They were the Fokker versions by then. Swift Air bought them to replace the Nord 262's that they had bought used to upgrade their fleet. I can remember seeing the F-27's fly overhead as they headed out over the coast for training flights (I was living in Morro Bay then, on the Central California coast). Seems like those went on for weeks on end before they ever entered service. The Hughes Airwest F-27's, at least those from the Pacific Airlines fleet, were the Fairchild models. I remember Pacific making it point that they were "Fairchild F-27's" in their literature. I did get an opportunity to fly on the Fairchild and thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the unhindered view out the window. The only drawback to the F-27, as I remember, that due to it's high wing, it had a very limited cargo capacity. I still, to this day, consider it one of the most eye appealing planes ever built.

Regards,
Phil

[jwh]

Back in the 80s I used to fly from Sydney to Brisbane regularly on the Friendship. Both East West Airlines and Airlines of NSW used them for this service with fares nearly half those of TAA and Ansett. They were much more leisurely flights as EWA usually went via Tamworth and Airlines of NSW stopped off at Newcastle and Coolangatta. Like others I loved the big windows and the fact you a great view wherever you were seated. Plus the flights were generally flown at an altitude of around 15,000 feet or perhaps a little more. I much preferred those Friendship flights compared to the DC-9 and 727 direct flights even though it took up to three hours. And sometimes you got to visit the cockpit and sit in the jumpseat. Something unheard of these days. All in all wonderful memories of a terrific aeroplane. Amazing to think it is over 60 years since they entered service.