McDonnell Douglas DC-9
1963 airliner family
The McDonnell Douglas DC-9 is an American five-abreast, single-aisle aircraft designed by the Douglas Aircraft Company. It was initially produced as the Douglas DC-9 before August 1967, when the company merged with McDonnell Aircraft to become McDonnell Douglas.
Even before the introduction of its first jetliner, the high-capacity Douglas DC-8, in 1959, Douglas was interested in producing an aircraft suited to smaller routes. As early as 1958, design studies were made; approval for the DC-9, a smaller all-new jetliner, came on April 8, 1963. The DC-9-10 first flew on February 25, 1965, and got its type certificate on November 23, to enter service with Delta Air Lines on December 8.
The DC-9 is powered by two rear-mounted Pratt & Whitney JT8D low-bypass turbofan engines under a T-tail for a cleaner wing aerodynamic. It has a two-person flight deck and built-in airstairs to better suit smaller airports. It was capable of taking off from 5,000-foot (1,500-metre) runways, connecting small cities and towns where jet service was previously impossible.
The Series 10 aircraft are 104 ft (32 m) long for typically 90 coach seats. The Series 30, stretched by 15 ft (4.6 m) to seat 115 in economy, has a larger wing and more powerful engines for a higher maximum takeoff weight (MTOW); it first flew in August 1966 and entered service in February 1967.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q221414. The Library of Congress control number is sh2012002897. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1959, 1958 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “McDonnell Douglas DC-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.