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1953 DHC-3 Alaska Coastal Airways

The history of this plane below was copied from "www.dhc30tter.com"

"Otter number 7 was the first Otter delivered to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), on 28th March 1953 with serial 3661. Before formal handover, while the Otter was still at Downsview, code letters AB were painted on the fuselage side, so that the side markings were presented as AB (roundel) 661 and in this guise a number of photographs were taken for publicity purposes. The letters AB were to give the Otter a “military look” and were not the code letters of any RCAF unit then intended to operate the Otter. The official user of the code AB at that time was 401 Squadron, which then flew Harvards and Vampires. One of the publicity photographs of 3661 is captioned “The first commissioned Otter flies over Downsview Airport on 13th March 1953. On this day a simulated SAR operation was conducted by members of the Trenton Para Rescue Section to show the new aircraft to the media”. RCAF Otters 3662, 3663, 3664, 3665 and 3666 were similarly painted with a spurious AB code for publicity purposes before delivery.

After Otter 3661 had been formally delivered by DHC to the RCAF on 28th March '53, it was allocated that month to the Central Experimental & Proving Establishment (CEPE) at Rockcliffe, Ottawa for the purposes of evaluation of this new type of aircraft to enter RCAF service. It then went to the Fort Churchill, Manitoba Station Flight, where its arrival is recorded on 4th July 1953. It entered service with the Flight alongside Norseman 789. The diary of the Churchill Station Flight records the many missions undertaken by 3661. It operated on floats during the summer months from Landing Lake at Churchill.

On 14th August '53 it operated a medevac to Baker Lake and on 20th August was in the Duck Lake and Neultin Lake areas searching for a lost trapper. Later that month it was involved in the search for 405 Squadron Lancaster 999 which had crashed, and performed a coast crawl from York Factory to Eskimo Point. When the Lancaster was found, its crew of 8 were picked up by the Otter from the lake where it had ditched and were flown to Churchill. On 31st August '53 both Norseman 789 and Otter 3661 flew to Ennadai Lake with rations.

On 6th October '53 the Otter made its last float trip to Knife Lake and on 8th October was removed from Landing Lake and re-configured with wheel-skis. For the winter months, it would operate from the airport at Churchill, continuing with its light transport and SAR taskings. On 2nd January 1954 it was involved in the search for the Flight's own Norseman 789 which went missing on a medevac flight from Fort Churchill to Baker Lake, a flight of three hours fifteen minutes. Six RCAF Dakotas were also involved in the search for the missing Norseman, two each from Winnipeg, Rivers and Edmonton, as well as Arctic Wings Avro Anson CF-GLA. When the Norseman was found on a small lake at 62.46 North 96.06 West, one of the Dakotas orbited the scene until the evacuation of the Norseman crew and passengers was carried out by Otter 3661 on 5th January.

On 15th February 1954 the Otter flew from Churchill to the scene of the Norseman forced landing with a repair party, but its tail assembly broke on landing on the rough terrain. When it became overdue, Dakota 971 from Winnipeg took off to fly to the area, but due to ice fog had to return to Churchill without finding the Otter. It departed again early the next morning and sighted the downed Otter beside the Norseman. The two aircraft had to remain where they were until 20th February '54, when the Arctic Wings Anson flew in with replacement crews, and both the Otter and the Norseman flew back to Churchill.

The following month, the Otter was re-assigned and took off from Churchill on 19th March '54 en-route to Ottawa, being replaced at Churchill by Otter 3672. On arrival at RCAF Station Rockcliffe, Ottawa 3661 entered service with 408 Squadron, adopting its MN code. Although based at Rockcliffe, the squadron spent much of its time deployed away from base, having been assigned the major task of mapping and surveying large tracts of the Canadian North. During the summer of 1954, four of the Squadron's Lancasters flew out of Goose Bay, Labrador on the mapping project, supported by six of the Squadron's Cansos and six Otters, including 3661. At the end of the summer season, 3661 and the other Otters returned to base at Rockcliffe for the winter, where they were engaged on local area flying and training.

Another major task entrusted to 408 Squadron was support of the construction of the Mid Canada Line (MCL) of radar sites along the 55th parallel of latitude, all 102 of them. In 1954 the RCAF launched a helicopter operation for the MCL with the formation of 108 Communications Flight which, with its H-19, H-21 and H-34 helicopters would carry men, supplies and equipment to the numerous isolated sites. On 18th June 1955 Otter 3661 i

Socata TB20 Trinidad

This article describes the author's experience, since 2002, of operation of the Socata TB20GT aircraft.

It was also written to help answer frequent questions asked by prospective TB20 buyers about type conversion issues, general operation, costs, and things to look out for.


PPL Training

This is just a brief bit of history to put things in perspective.

I started PPL training in 2000. The objective was to learn to fly so I could travel to far away places around Europe, and to see Europe from the air.

The PPL training scene at my local airport was somewhat behind the times... The first training plane was the PA38 Tomahawk which is a type most charitably described as an "exciting" plane to fly, but its condition was something else.

The plastic had come off the yoke (the control column) many years before and one was holding bare metal rusted through years of students' sweat. After a rainy night there would be a puddle of water on the floor and the plane smelt like an old-style public telephone kiosk.

During preflight fuel drain tests following a rainy night, it was not unusual to drain out several test beakers full of water before the fuel would start to come out - presumably due to perished filler cap seals.

After about 20hrs of lessons, I left this school due to this and other less mentionable maintenance issues.

The next school operated Cessna 152s, in which I finished the UK/JAA PPL in May 2001.

These were decrepit too but quite pleasant to fly and very easy to land due to ground effect being nearly absent.

The first thing which became obvious during PPL training was that the entire scene was very far removed from the reason I was learning to fly.

Even if the training planes had been functionally capable of going somewhere "serious" (which they weren't, due to range) convincing passengers to come along would be a challenge.

They were not unsafe in the sense that the wings would not fall off but their condition was poor at best and only hardened anoraks would want to travel in them regularly.

More technically, the range of a Cessna 152 or a PA28-161 means that a flight from the UK to e.g. Prague would involve one or two fuel stops which makes it a gruelling all-day exercise - in each direction!

Topping off a plane is not like dropping into a petrol station; in Europe one normally has to clear Customs even just for an airside-only fuel stop, so landings are generally to be avoided unless one actually wants to do something there.

It also became obvious, after the 2nd or 3rd cancelled lesson, that flying would be all but useless without an instrument capability.

During one Oct-Dec period I booked every day to fly (i.e. 90 lessons) and due to rain and low cloud I got just 3 lessons in!

Unfortunately nothing available for rental was suitable for "real" instrument flight.

For instrument training, we used one plane (with a working VOR but a duff ADF) for VOR work, and another plane (with a duff VOR, duff DME, but a working ADF) for NDB work.

Therefore, I started looking around for planes to "get into long-term" (in a syndicate, or to buy outright) very soon after starting PPL training.

This annoyed the various instructors, most of whom were ATPL hour builders who had never flown past the nearest crease in their charts and who knew next to nothing about different aircraft types.

Naturally they preferred me to carry on renting what they had on offer - self fly hire is an important source of income to a flying school.



Aircraft Choice

This was done largely through a process of elimination of everything I did not want. After the PPL which took 66 hours, I converted to and rented PA28-160s and -180s in which I accumulated about 50 hours on various local flights, while looking around at various options.

By this time, the requirements had been refined:

- no high wing (cannot see properly when doing steep turns)

- no single door (hard to get in/out, and difficult emergency escape - I had one of the two PA28 door locks jam once and that was enough)

- a modern design with 2 doors which is easy for everybody to get in and out of

- IFR avionics including a large screen GPS which is good for both VFR and IFR

- suitable for both hard runways and grass, 500m tarmac or 750m grass

- long range, suitable for the 400-600nm legs (with reserves for another 200+nm) typical in European touring

- actual aircraft less than 15 years old (aluminium airframes tend to need significant airframe parts after this point)

- an RMI with ADF and VOR needles (NDB approaches are a feature of European IFR and are not going to go away anytime soon)

- 130kt+ cruise

No suitable syndicates were found. The nearest I got to was a share in a Socata TB10, but it was quickly established that some of the IFR avionics were not functioning and the VFR-only members were unwilling to pay their share of fixing them; this turned out to be a common scen