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.
“In our preoccupation with the floatplane the design and construction of a wheeled undercarriage had been postponed,” the Beaver’s aerodynamicist, Dick Hiscocks, dryly recalls.1 By July the Beaver was photographed with a wheel landing gear while undergoing its fuselage stress tests.
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.
