Pacific Southwest Airlines Douglas DC-4
N88747, late 1950s, By William T. Larkins via Ed Coates Collection. By the mid 1950s, PSA's cheap fares had attracted load factors greater than the DC-3s could handle and four DC-4s were acquired from Capital Airlines. William T. Larkins caught this one on a rain swept Oakland ramp in the late 1950s. PSA was one of the DC-4 operators who took to painting square surrounds framing the portholes of their aircraft to give the impression, to the uninitiated, that the machine in which they were about to embark was a DC-6! Several airlines succumbed to this ploy. Anyway, this ex C-54-DO was sold off in 1960 and went to Starways in the U.K. as G-ARIY. Its ultimate fate was as a fire fighting training hulk at Liverpool's Speke Airport in the mid 1960s.