page_title: Dornier Do X
section_title: Operation
hierarchical_section_title: Dornier Do X / Operation
caption_attribution_description: English: Dornier DO-X Rio de Janeiro to New York first flight cover w/Brazilian franking, August 5-27, 1931. The Cooper Collection of Aero Postal History These postage stamps are in the Public Domain as provided for in Brazilian Federal Statutes 3071/1916, art. 662, 5988/1973, art. 46, and 9610/1998, art. 115 as they were commissioned and published by the Brazilian government prior to 1983.
context_page_description: The Dornier Do X was the largest, heaviest, and most powerful flying boat in the world when it was produced by the Dornier company of Germany in 1929. First conceived by Claude Dornier in 1924, planning started in late 1925 and after over 240,000 work-hours it was completed in June 1929.
  During the years between the two World Wars, only the Soviet Tupolev ANT-20 Maksim Gorki landplane of a few years later was physically larger, but at 53 metric tonnes maximum takeoff weight it was not as heavy as the Do X's 56 tonnes.
  The Do X was financed by the German Transport Ministry and in order to circumvent conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade any aircraft exceeding set speed and range limits to be built by Germany after World War I, a specially designed plant was built at Altenrhein, on the Swiss portion of Lake Constance.
  The type was popular with the public, but a lack of commercial interest and a number of non-fatal accidents prevented more than three examples from being built.
context_section_description: The Flugschiff ("flying ship"), as it was called, was launched for its first test flight on 12 July 1929, with a crew of 14. To satisfy skeptics, on its 70th test flight on 21 October there were 169 on board of which 150 were passengers (mostly production workers and their families, and a few journalists), ten were aircrew and nine were "stowaways" who did not hold tickets. The flight set a new world record for the number of persons carried on a single flight, a record that was not broken for 20 years. After a takeoff run of 50 seconds the Do X slowly climbed to an altitude of 200 m (650 ft). As a result of its size, passengers were asked to crowd together on one side or the other to help make turns. It flew for 40 minutes (Flug Revue claims it was the 42nd flight and lasted 53 minutes, and historical film shows "fliegt mit 170 personen") at a maximum speed of 170 km/h (105 mph) before landing on Lake Constance.
  To introduce the airliner to the potential United States market the Do X took off from Friedrichshafen, Germany on 3 November 1930, under the command of Friedrich Christiansen for a transatlantic test flight to New York. The route took the Do X to the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Portugal. The journey was interrupted at Lisbon on 29 November, when a tarpaulin made contact with a hot exhaust pipe and started a fire that consumed most of the left wing. After sitting in Lisbon harbour for six weeks while new parts were fabricated and the damage repaired, the flying boat continued (with several further mishaps and delays) along the Western coast of Africa and by 5 June 1931 had reached the islands of Cape Verde, from which it crossed the ocean to Natal in Brazil, where the crew were greeted as heroes by the local German émigré communities.
  The flight continued north via San Juan to the United States, reaching New York on 27 August 1931, almost ten months after departing Friedrichshafen. The Do X and crew spent the next nine months there as its engines were overhauled, and thousands of sightseers made the trip to Glenn Curtiss Airport (now LaGuardia Airport) to tour the leviathan of the air. The economic effects of the Great Depression dashed Dornier's marketing plans for the Do X, and it departed from New York on 21 May 1932 flying via Newfoundland and the Azores to Müggelsee, Berlin where it arrived on 24 May and was met by a cheering crowd of 200,000.
caption: Cover carried from Rio de Janeiro to New York on the Do-X, August 5–27, 1931
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "CanoScan LiDE 25", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2009:06:02 02:13:36", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "224", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "454", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6211", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:06:02 02:01:07", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1320", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "747", "EXIF FileSource": "Reflection Print Scanner", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto"}