"Four large Dornier aëroplanes..."

Photo by Clemens Vasters from Viersen, Germany, Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 Just a little fun thing: I'm re-reading Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness because (I think) Justin and I are going to talk about it on our next episode of The Wordy Pair.

I guess I haven't mentioned our little podcast on this blog yet, have I? Oh well, there it is! It's funny and goofy and we talk a lot about writing and great stories.

Anyway, right at the beginning of Lovecraft's story, he mentions the airplanes they use in the story with the words that make up the title of this post.

I thought it would be fun and interesting to see if I could figure out which planes these were, and it looks like I probably have a good idea.

Dornier, you see, was well-known mostly for its boat-planes. They only had a few larger models that were designed to land on the ground.

I think the best candidate for what the Dornier planes in Lovecraft's story look like is the Do Bal B Merkur, a plane that can be flown by one and can carry up to ten passengers. It was common in the late 1920s, and Lovecraft apparently wrote Mountains in 1931, although it wasn't published until 1936. The Merkur was Dornier's commercial success at about that time.

The other possible but unlikely candidate is the Do K, but there were only ever three prototypes built, so this seems unlikely.