DE
HAVILLAND BEAVER
Few pilots would quibble over the Beaver’s reputation
as the quintessential bush plane. Even old-school fans of the
Norseman admit that the Beaver is a better performer—easier
to handle, more agile and more tolerant of adverse flying conditions.
Like most engineering feats, the
Beaver was a product of teamwork. In the early 1930s, a Polish
aeronautical engineer named Wsiewolod “Jaki” Jakimiuk
helped to design a pug-nosed fighter plane called the PZL for
the Polish air force. During the Second World War, his creation
performed impressively against the superior German Luftwaffe.
After the war, Jakimiuk moved
to Canada and took an engineering job with de Havilland, bringing
with him his ideas and designs. With de Havilland wanting to
get into the bush plane market, Jakimiuk and his team rolled
up their sleeves and set out to build a better plane than the
Norseman.
They needed an expert pilot on
their team, and they found him in Clennell Haggerston Dickins,
perhaps better known as “Punch.” Born in Portage
la Prairie, Manitoba, in 1899, Punch Dickins flew in the military
during the First World War, and went on to become one of Canada’s
greatest bush pilots. In 1936, for example, Dickins filled a
huge hole in Canada’s map by completing a 16,000-kilometre
air survey of the Arctic. He flew the entire length of the Mackenzie
River—3,200 kilometres in two days—and was the first
to deliver airmail in Western Canada. When he was named an Officer
of the Order of Canada in 1968, he was approaching two million
kilometres of wilderness flying under his belt.
Dickins brought a pilot’s
practical eye to de Havilland. Until then, bush planes were
ill suited for cold weather—the first bush pilots had
to tough out winter weather in open-cockpit airplanes. Planes
such as the Norseman had enclosed cockpits, but were notoriously
hot in the summer and still cold in the winter. Dickins sought
to counter that and more by building an airplane suited for
the high North, where “our competition is the dogsled.”
He made countless improvements to the design, such as an oil
spout inside the cockpit, which enabled the pilot to add oil
to the engine while airborne, and a battery that could easily
be taken out of its housing and kept warm in a cabin overnight.
And thanks to a radical wing design
allowing for short takeoffs and landings, the Beaver was capable
of getting into and out of tight spots. The American military
was so impressed with its performance that it ordered almost
a thousand Beavers, many of which ended up in the Korean War.
After the war, hundreds of those same Beavers came home to Canada
and were picked up at war-surplus prices by backwoods air operators,
who cleaned them up and mounted them on pontoons. Many others
wound up on backwoods landing strips in the Third World, where
they still serve as flying pickup trucks.
Like any airplane, though, the
Beaver has its quirks. The wings are of uniform width from root
to tip, which eliminates the buffeting and shudder that, in
more modern planes, warn of an impending wing stall. Rookie
pilots are therefore cautioned not to take liberties with the
Beaver in a steep turn. But in more than 50 years of service,
the Beaver has had few accidents, and of those most were the
fault of the pilot. As one bush pilot puts it, “Everyone
loves the Beaver—it’s mild-mannered and nicely balanced,
and very easy to fly.”
And a flying advertisement throughout
the world for Canadian ingenuity. 
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