In article ,
(Prowlus) writes:
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?

They did. Pan Am ordered 15 Convair Model 37s, the commercial flavor
of the C-99, in February, 1945. The expected payload was about 200
passengers adn 15,000# of baggage & mail. Things didn't work out
quite the way they expected though - After the war ended, there
weren't enough people travelling to fill a 200-seat airplane, and the
U.S. government made surplaus C-54s (DC-4s) available for bargain
prices.

Given the history of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, (The airliner
version of the B-29/B-50/C-97), I wonder if the Model 37 could have
been flown at a profit even if there were a travel boom. The Strats
were more complex than the DC-4 and Constellations they were competing
with, and the 28 cylinder R4360s they were powered by - the same basic
engine used in the C-99 - was pretty troublesome in commercial
service. The B.377 wasn't commercially viable, even though its
performance was substantially higher than the DC-4 or early Connie.

IIRC, at some point, Douglas proposed a passenger version of the C-74
(The single-story predecessor to the C-124) to fill the same niche (It
was, I believe, designated DC-7 for a short time, before the DC-7
designation was used for the stretched DC-6), with the same results.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster