"Prowlus" wrote in message
m...
Looking at a recent article of the convair xc-99 pusher transport I'm
suprised convair didn't consider turning it into a civil airlinner
during development . With the ability to carry 400 passengers,
wouldn't this plane have ushured in the concept of mass-air travel
decades before the 747 if it had been built?

Way too big for its era--it would have found relatively few civil airports
that could have supported its use at that time. Way too slow--the emphasis
was quickly shifting to speed, not tremendous passenger capacity, at the
time of the XC-99 development. Not to mention it would likely have been
rather uncomfortable for the passengers (internal noise for the B-36 was
pretty high, IIRC, due to those six massive recip engines). So in summation,
you'd have had an aircraft that could only be operated from a handful of
airports at the time, would have subjected its passengers to significant
discomfort, and would have kept them in that condition for a longer period
of flight than competing aircraft--not a good business proposition, IMO.

Brooks