The International Cessna^® 170 Association

Hey George, just for info on the DC-4/C-54 there was no flight engineer station - in fact only the military had FEs on the C-54, as far as I know, and he sat on the jump seat seat exactly as the movie showed. The DC-6/7 also had no FE panel and for that matter neither did the Lockheed Electra.

The Boeing Stratocruiser and Lockheed Constellation had a MAJOR full blown FE panel with more switches and dials that can possibly be imagined.
Those complex machines always had poorer operating economics than the Douglas airplanes.

I recently saw "The Big Lift" on a New York layover and was very impressed with the scenes of landing at Templehof in the middle of all those buildings - fantastic! The DC-4 is one of favorite old time airliners, someday I'll build an electric R/C model of one. Russ Farris

P.S. The "Battle of Britain" is a fav of mine, and George is right - one of the last movies using real WWII airplanes. The scene of the Stukas dive bombing the radar stations was done with R/C models, however - but exceptionally well done.

I was a young flight instructor at Houston Hobby in 1970 and a freight operator was flying a Constellation full of oil-field pipe out of there regularly to So. America. They'd do their maintenance there on layovers and I'd get to ride out to the run-up area and watch those ocilloscopes at the F.E. panel light-up. It was a lot of fun.
They'd leave with 30,000 pounds of pipe in that thing and disappear over the horizon before they'd gain any altitude. (They'd take off on the main tanks which had expensive 115/145 Octane in 'em and they could pull maximum Manifold Pressure (which I think was 75" if I recall correctly) , then as soon as the wheels were up, they'd pull the power back to METO and switch to the aux's to run on 100/130 Octane which was cheaper and more plentiful. They were saving the high octane stuff for the next takeoff out of So. America somewhere.) The joke was that the only reason it flew with that much weight was due to curvature of the earth.
God, I love round smoky engines.