McDonnell Douglas C-9
1968 airlifter family by McDonnell Douglas
The McDonnell Douglas C-9 is a retired military version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 airliner. It was produced as the C-9A Nightingale for the United States Air Force, and the C-9B Skytrain II for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The final flight of the C-9A Nightingale was in September 2005, and the C-9C was retired in September 2011. The U.S. Navy retired its last C-9B in July 2014. The two remaining C-9s in Marine service were retired in April 2017.
Despite being officially retired, one C-9B, BuNo 161529, was seen as late as November 2020 being operated by the U.S. Air Force as an experimental sensor testbed.
Design and development
In 1966, the U.S. Air Force identified a need for an aeromedical transport aircraft and ordered C-9A Nightingale aircraft the following year. Deliveries began in 1968. The U.S. Air Force received 21 C-9A aircraft from 1968 to 1969. The C-9As were used for medical evacuation, passenger transportation, and special missions from 1968 to 2005.
“McDonnell Douglas C-9” enters the record as 1968 airlifter family by McDonnell Douglas. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what McDonnell, Douglas and airlifter can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3686766. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2011, 2014 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “McDonnell Douglas C-9” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.