Its landing gear was not the Beaver’s only improvised feature, but it was one of the most successful. In a matter of hours “a block of rubber in a sort of nutcracker arrangement,” as Hiscocks characterizes it, “was pressed into service.”2 With more time, a more conventional oleo, or combined air-and-oil type of shock strut arrangement, might have been used. No doubt such a mechanism would have given trouble in the north, where oleo seals froze solid and then leaked.3 In fact, the use of rubber as a shock-absorbing device was an old engineering ploy of the English de Havilland company of Hatfield. It was used, in a different way, on the company’s wartime Mosquito fighter-bomber.
Nevertheless, from that time on, a Beaver on wheels has always looked odd and somehow incomplete, like Ginger Rogers in a wheelchair. Ernest Krahulec, who would be the Beaver prototype’s mechanic when it went into service with Russ Baker’s Central British Columbia Airways and later Pacific Western Airlines, always took care to save that particular set of wheeled landing gear for that unique aircraft. Only that set of landing gear would fit that airplane.
The first Beaver was singular in other ways. The valleys and wrinkles on the aluminum fuselage skin, where hand-formed panels were riveted to the interior structure, were emphasized by seemingly random reflections off the polished metal on the sunny morning of its first flight. A crew in the experimental shop had stayed up all night polishing the Beaver, while Charlie Smith manned the stores-department desk in case they needed any last-minute parts. A matte black anti-glare panel in front of the windshield was the only paint on the Beaver’s gleaming fuselage.
Most of the markings an aircraft carries are meant to identify it. If anyone from outside the DHC plant—or most of the workers inside it, for that matter—wondered what the strange, angular was, no clue was offered by the white lettering on a horizontal black stipe running across the prototype’s vertical tail: CF-FHB-X. CF. made it a Canadian-registered airplane, which revealed very little. The Letters FHB said a lot to anyone who knew what they stood for.
Those letters were a tribute to the Beaver’s chief design engineer, a low-key, can-do, problem-solving wizard named Frederick Howard Buller. The x was for Experimental.
CF-FHB-X, the handbuilt and polished Beaver prototype, undergoing engine runups and control surface tests shortly before its two-part first flight the morning of August 16, 1947. DHC VIA PETER M. BOWERS
There was almost nothing experimental or tentative about the Beaver that morning, aside from the fact that it had not yet flown. All successful aircraft are designed with specific missions in mind, but few have succeeded so spectacularly and for so long in such demanding circumstances as the Beaver. In conditions where arrival and departure involve dangerous terrain or capricious weather, there is no substitute for a Beaver. Unlike most fixed-wing aircraft, the Beaver can get out of pretty much any situation it can get itself into. The demand for Beavers is such that they are being rebuilt better than new. More Beavers are flying today than ten years ago—not just as millionaires’ restorations, but as hard-working commercial aircraft flying in the most unpredictable weather conditions in the world along the foggy and mountainous North Pacific coast from Portland to Anchorage.
Histories of flight are usually organized to show the advances in speed, ceiling, range and payload—the categories in which aviation records are set. But it is also possible to see the history of aviation as a quest for the most important goal, safety aloft, with the Beaver as its outcome. As early as 1929, with the Guggenheim safe aircraft competition that offered $150,000, a lot of money in the twenties, the search had begun for an aircraft that could meet such stringent conditions as a requirement that it be controllable in flight at only 35 mph.4
The Fairchild F-II Husky first flew more than a year before the Beaver, and was its competition for a 25-30-plane order from the Ontario Provincial Air Service. The Beaver’s performance edge won it the OPAS contract. About a dozen Huskies were built. PETER BOWERS
Hiscocks, who formulated the Beaver’s wing and its high-lift devices, makes his own claim for the Beaver when he calls it “the first serious short takeoff and landing (STOL) airplane.”5 By this he means that, while there were STOL aircraft, such as the Guggenheim competitors and Germany’s wartime Fieseler Storch, that offered short-field performance even better than the Beaver’s, not until the Beaver appeared did such an aircraft carry useful commercial payloads. And, while some subsequent turboprop STOL aircraft (including the Turbo Beaver) exceed the Wasp Junior-powered Beaver’s takeoff and landing performance because of their greater power, the turboprop engine is not at its best in the kind of short-haul, low-level, island-hopping work that is the Beaver’s forte.
Following the Beaver’s success came a line of de Havilland Canada aircraft that continued to embody the single most critical element of flight safety: the ability to fly slowly and under control, and thereby take off and land in as short a distance as possible.
Russ Bannock was hired as much for his organizational abilities as for his talent as a pilot. He was taken on by DHC managing director Phil Garratt, firstly as operations manager and second as chief test pilot. Bannock eventually became president of the company during the mid-1970s—a difficult period in the company’s history when spiralling developmental costs on the Dash-7 commuter airliner series led to a government takeover.
As a test pilot, Bannock had more in common with the future breed of scientific evaluators than the daredevils of the past who had flown the wings off new types in terminal-velocity dives. He had made it his business to be present when most of the important engineering decisions about the Beaver were made. The prototype was no stranger to him when it was rolled out of Bill Burlison’s experimental shop that August 16 morning.
Although Bannock was no engineer, he had worked closely with the engineering department to resolve the difficult issue of what engine should power the Beaver. Once that was decided, Bannock stayed in touch with the changes mandated by the new engine, changes that extended from nose to tail. His preparation for the first flight would be to work out and review “a test program to develop handling characteristics, performance criteria, and all the data required to take the aircraft up to certification by the Department of Transport.”6
Inside the cockpit of this outwardly spartan prototype, there were touches of something close to the exotic. Four doors on a small airplane! Having doors for both pilot and co-pilot verged on the luxurious, but was pure practicality for an airplane expected to be so fully loaded the rear doors would be blocked, an airplane that would normally park on one side or another of a dock. In time, two more hatches, in the roof and floor, would be added.
The instrument panel was as streamlined as anything else on the aircraft. It curved back and down from the base of the windshield with its three vertical slots down the upper middle for the throttle, propeller pitch and fuel mixture levers—equally accessible to pilot and co-pilot—and was neatly finished at the bottom of the slots with a chrome strip on which black paint outlined the shiny capital letters DE HAVILLAND. There were no seats in the prototype except for the pilot’s.
That morning Bannock looked like the fighter ace he was, in the same Royal Canadian Air Force sunglasses and blue-grey flight suit he had worn on Mosquito operations. Not a hair was out of place. His flight suit, besides fitting well, had plenty of pockets for the pencils, pens, notebooks, maps and calculated data he would carry on the flight. The trousers,