Western Air Express  Douglas DST-A207       NC18101                (c/n 1959)

                                    

                                        The cozy arrangement WAE had with United extended to the inclusion of  "Mainliner" titling on the
                                        fuselage of their DSTs and DC-3s.  NC18101 was a Sky Sleeper delivered new to the airline in
                                        1937.   Continued talks of a merger with United during the mid-1930s was finally quashed by the
                                        new Civil Aeronautics Board when it was founded in 1938 who decreed that such a marriage would
                                        give United a monopoly.  The grainy image below is from a Western Air Lines Flight Times house
                                        journal and depicts a sister aircraft to the one above posing with a restored Douglas M-2 sometime
                                        in the early 1940s. 
                        
                                          Douglas DST-A207    NC18102      (c/n  1960)