The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter
honours the Beaver prototype, CF-FHB. It is one of four stamps issued by Canada Post to commemorate aircraft that opened up the nation’s vast northern regions. The others pictured were the Fairchild FC-2WI, Noorduyn Norseman, and Fokker Super Universal. The artist is Robert Bradford. CANADA POST
The story of the Beaver’s origins is one of the early successes of niche marketing. Hiscocks is the first to say that the Beaver was a team effort. The renaissance man who would become de Havilland Canada’s greatest design engineer, Fred Buller, was responsible for most of what went underneath Hiscocks’s blunt-nosed shape. Garratt, the managing director, had been thinking about a bush plane even before the Downsview factory’s huge wartime contracts were cancelled in 1945, leaving the company with a superior design and production staff and the facilities to mass-produce advanced aircraft. Garratt envisioned an all-metal bush plane and had a preliminary design drawn by his chief design engineer, W. J. Jakimiuk, even before the war ended. Jakimiuk, a war refugee from Poland, happened to be a pioneer of European all-metal aircraft construction. Buller and Hiscocks, young engineers with rich wartime experience, reworked Jakimiuk’s ideas. As the design took shape over the next two years, Canada’s bush-flying community was intensively consulted—especially the pilots of the Ontario Provincial Air Service. Asked for his opinion, the dean of western Canadian bush flying, Punch Dickins, endorsed the design by agreeing to sell it.
The Beaver’s success was no accident. Extraordinary talent, capably directed from above and guided by the ideas of the people who would fly it, made the Beaver a milestone of aircraft engineering.
As we flew low over the San Juan Islands in the Lake Union Air Beaver—low enough to see people washing cars—I wondered whether our youthful pilot, knowledgeable as he was, fully understood the ancient design origins of the machine he was flying. The Beaver looks older than it is, an artful mix of sheer utility and conscious flair. Its ancestry extends back to the first fighters to engage the Luftwaffe at the dawn of World War II. It has the gracefully S-shaped trademark de Havilland fin that adorned the company’s wartime Tiger Moth trainer and Mosquito bomber. The Beaver’s throttle, propeller and fuel mixture levers move vertically in grooves in the middle of a “Streamline Moderne” dashboard—more of a dashboard than an instrument panel. The Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior powerplant is, by today’s standards, colossally noisy. And it is very close at hand.
“You hear big pilots say, ‘Why did you have to put the engine so close?“’ Hiscocks chuckles. “Well, the plane wouldn’t balance any other way.”
Radials also run rough, so everything vibrates. Other aircraft have been described as 10,000 parts flying in close formation, but very few of the others are still in the air.
The Beaver survives because it has enough thoughtful features to have been a reinvention of the bush plane. Four doors instead of the more usual one, the rear ones wide enough to roll an oil drum through. Most aircraft have their gas tanks in the wings, feeding the engine by gravity, but that means pumps, hoses and rickety ladders for refuelling. The Beaver’s tanks are under the floor, with fillers low on the fuselage. The fuel-drain stops are oversized so they can be unscrewed with mitts on. Engine oil can be thinned within the engine for easier cold-weather starts. Oil can be added in flight, although the process can be messy, from a filler spout located near the base of the control column.
Chief pilot Bill Pennings of Vancouver’s Harbour Air, who has logged a remarkable 10,000 hours on the company’s fourteen Beavers, says he has flown snowmobiles in them, a useful capability in the north, by removing the cargo doors on each side and letting the ski--doo’s front and back hang out. He has a 1991 Bush Pilots calendar in which the September photo shows a float-equipped Beaver towing a loaded barge. Heh-heh-heh....
Nearly a thousand of the Beavers built, by Hiscocks’s estimate, are still busy, an amazing number considering that they are used in the most forbidding parts of the world and are veterans of two wars. Half of those survivors are in Canada. They are worth about ten times the factory price, about $250,000, still a bargain compared with, say, the single-engine Cessna Caravan at $1.5 million. Dozens of little improvements have made it a better airplane. Today’s Beaver is cleared to carry more weight than when it came out of the factory at Downsview.
Dick Hiscocks talks about the immortal Beaver much as Leopold Mozart must have talked about his son Wolfgang. Likewise, the Beaver is a thing unto itself, an immediate success that is still irreplaceable along British Columbia’s convoluted coastline, darting through mountain passes into small bays and coves, alighting on the water and getting out again where few other aircraft venture.
By definition, of course, a classic comes close to perfection. Its essentials cannot be improved upon. Twice de Havilland attempted to increase the Beaver’s performance by installing yet more powerful engines. Neither time did the new model catch on—although the Turbo Beaver was the victim of a decision by new owners of the company to close the production line. An old aviation saying, often applied to the wartime de Havilland Mosquito, is that if it looks right, it will fly right.
Dick Hiscocks 1 ves in one of the most admirably sited apartment buildings anywhere: the one closest to Stanley Park’s southeastern edge. He overlooks an urban wilderness, where bush pilots fly executives to downtown office towers. He can see a continual parade of Beavers on final approach for landings in Burrard Inlet. They take off with a sound that reverberates around the grain elevators that line Burrard Inlet. One by one, the Beavers are returning to Dick Hiscocks’s saltwater backyard pond.
Chapter One The Beaver takes off
Facing page: Smiling test pilot Russ Bannock climbs out of Beaver prototype CF-FHB-X early in the afternoon of August 16, 1947, after the second takeoff and landing of its two-part first flight. He tells chief engineer Doug Hunter (grey hair), chief designer jaki JakimiuK (jacket) and aerodynamicist Dick Miscodes that the airplane is a delight to fly. DHC
No matter how much metal working finesse goes into the construction of a prototype airplane, there is a roughness around the edges, a dimpled aluminum skin and a general lack of finish chat is the mark of a handbuilt machine. Details come later. The esthetics can watt. No need for a racy paint job yet. Let’s see if this thing; will fly.
Still, the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver prototype that Wing Commander Russ Bannock climbed into shortly before 10 A.M. on August 16, 1947, was a handsome airplane in its own way: a sturdy-looking, squared-off, pug-nosed fuselage, fronted with a big, flat, non-nonsense radial engine, with its bulk set on thick land inggear struts that gave it the look of a heads-up bulldog ready to leap off the ground.
To the eyes of the engineers who had designed and built it, though, this first Beaver looked distinctly odd on wheels. The Beaver had been intended from the beginning to operate from water, a more demanding medium to leave and return to than concrete or grass. It looked better on floats. Still does.
In fact this prototype had, until a few weeks before, been mounted on floats in Bill Burlison’s experimental shop. Its reserve of power in operating from water would be the Beaver’s competitive advantage over other single-engine bush planes, including the one that looked to be the Beaver’s main competition in the postwar market, the Fairchild Husky (which had flown for the first time more than a year before near Montreal). The Husky was a bigger plane powered by the same engine, giving the Beaver a performance edge.
It is part of the lore of the Beaver that only during those last few weeks before its first flight did it occur to someone in the shop that the de Havilland Aircraft of Canada (DHC) factory at Downsview is totally landlocked. The city of Toronto lay between the factory and the Lake Ontario waterfront. The Beaver was on floats.
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