The airborne assault on Normandy was, above all, a C-47 operation. The troop carrier groups of the US Ninth Air Force flew the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to their drop zones behind Utah Beach, while RAF Dakotas carried much of the British 6th Airborne Division to the east. At the head of the main American stream flew That’s All, Brother, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel John Donalson; behind it came more than 800 C-47s that dropped over 13,000 paratroopers.

It was a brutal night for the crews. They flew low and slow in tight formation, without armour or self-sealing tanks in many aircraft, into cloud banks over the coast and then into flak and small-arms fire. Formations broke up, and many sticks of paratroopers landed miles from their drop zones. Yet the scattered drops confused the German defenders as much as the attackers, and the airborne troops seized enough causeways and crossroads to help the beach landings succeed.

The C-47s came back for the next airborne operations: Dragoon in southern France, Market Garden in the Netherlands and Varsity across the Rhine in March 1945. That’s All, Brother flew most of them. Sold to civilian owners after the war, it lost its identity for decades until two Air Force Reserve historians traced it to a boneyard in Wisconsin. The Commemorative Air Force restored it to its 1944 configuration, and it flew back over the Normandy drop zones for the 75th anniversary in 2019.

When the Soviet Union closed the land routes into West Berlin in June 1948, the aircraft immediately to hand were C-47s, and the Smithsonian credits them with starting the Berlin Airlift. USAF Skytrains and RAF Dakotas flew the first weeks of the lift until the bigger four-engined C-54 Skymaster took over the bulk of the work. In Korea, C-47s flew supplies, flare missions and casualty evacuation from rough strips; in Southeast Asia the US Air Force fitted them with side-firing miniguns as the AC-47, with direction-finding receivers as the EC-47 and with loudspeakers for psychological operations.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of hours of airline and military flying created a global fleet of tired but sound airframes. The fix was turbine power. Basler Turbo Conversions was founded in 1990 to convert existing C-47 and DC-3 airframes into the BT-67: Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-67R turboprops with five-blade Hartzell propellers, a lengthened fuselage, strengthened structure and modern systems, certificated to FAR Part 25 standards. Around seventy have been built. The Colombian Air Force armed its conversions as gunships for counter-insurgency, other air forces in Latin America, Africa and Asia use them as transports and patrol aircraft, and ski-equipped BT-67s operated by Kenn Borek Air carry scientists across Antarctica. South Africa ran its own turboprop conversion, the C-47TP, for maritime patrol and transport.

The crew of the C-47 sat side by side in a cockpit that was essentially that of the airliner, with a navigator and radio operator behind them in wartime aircraft and a crew chief in the cabin. The cabin itself was a long tube with folding troop seats along both walls, tie-down rings in the floor and a cargo door on the left rear fuselage large enough for a jeep or a light artillery piece to be loaded with ramps. An astrodome above the navigator’s station allowed celestial navigation over ocean and jungle.

The paratroop version carried a jump door, static-line cable and signal lights; jumpmasters stood the stick up at the red light and went at the green. Glider towing used a hook beneath the tail, and late in the war crews practised the extraordinary snatch pickup, hooking a glider off the ground from low level. The Navy’s R4Ds added equipment for naval logistics, and Antarctic aircraft wore large skis over their wheels. In every version the fundamentals stayed the same: cable-operated controls, hydraulically retracting main gear and two big radials that rewarded careful handling with long lives.

• C-47, C-47A, C-47B: the main wartime production versions; the B had supercharged engines for high-altitude routes such as the Hump.
• C-53 Skytrooper: a lighter troop-carrier version without the big cargo door.
• R4D: US Navy and Marine Corps designation; the R4D-5L and R4D-8 among later versions.
• Dakota I to IV: RAF and Commonwealth names for the C-47 family.
• C-117 and Super DC-3: post-war rebuilt versions with longer fuselage and new tail.
• AC-47 Spooky, EC-47, VC-47: Vietnam-era gunship, electronic reconnaissance and VIP versions.
• Lisunov Li-2: Soviet licence-built derivative with Shvetsov engines; Showa/Nakajima L2D in Japan.
• C-47TP: South African turboprop conversion.
• Basler BT-67: Oshkosh-built PT6A-67R turboprop remanufacture with stretched fuselage, around 285 kt maximum speed, 210 kt cruise, 38 passengers and up to 2,140 nm range with long-range tanks.

A wartime C-47 was cheap because it was mass-produced on airliner tooling. Running one today is another matter. The R-1830 radials need skilled engineers, overhauls and avgas, which is increasingly expensive and scarce outside North America and Europe; warbird operators budget accordingly, and the figures above are an estimate rather than a published rate. The Basler conversion attacks exactly this problem: PT6A turboprops burn jet fuel available at any military airfield, need far less routine maintenance and add power for hot-and-high and ski operations, which is why air forces and polar operators have paid for rebuilt airframes rather than new aircraft.