Published: Saturday, February 18, 2012, 5:43 AM
By Laurie Robinson, The Oregonian
If you're flying in to the Alaskan or Canadian bush to start any kind of wilderness adventure and you have a chance to ride in a hard-working piece of aviation history with a certain no-frills, 1940s-style glamour, take it. Be excited.
De Havilland Beavers are still the workhorses of the north even though the last one was delivered in 1968. Thirty feet long with a 48-foot wingspan, they can hold up to seven people but are often set up for the pilot, four passengers and gear.
Of the 1,692 of them that were built starting in 1947, about 800 Beavers are known to still be active, says aviation artist Neil Aird of Kingston, Ontario, who has made it his mission to locate and document every Beaver on his website.
The planes were built in the Toronto suburb of Downsview, Ontario, and the U.S. military bought more than 900 of them, most of which eventually passed into civilian hands.
De Havilland originally was a British company, but the Canadian subsidiary designed the plane after asking bush pilots in the north what they needed. They needed a high-lift wing that could take off and land in a short distance -- on a small lake, for example -- even with heavy loads, and one that could be fitted for floats, wheels or skis.
"They were built tough," says pilot Warren LaFave of Kluane Airways, who uses his Beaver to fly canoeists and rock climbers into Nahanni National Park Preserve and other remote areas, and has flown it more than 15,000 hours.
"They were a very well-made, very robust plane. They just do everything safely that a bush operator wants."
Some of the old Beavers have been retrofitted with modern turbine engines, but most still have the original, distinctive radial-style piston engines that old plane buffs love. LaFave's plane has one of the typical 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial engines -- a powerful engine for that size plane.
Beavers are one of the few planes in Canada that are approved to carry canoes and other loads strapped to the outside.
LaFave owns a wilderness fishing lodge for paying guests on a lake in the Yukon. He built it by carrying in all the materials with his Beaver -- 1,200 trips of 1,400 pounds each. Everything that couldn't fit inside got strapped outside, including a hot tub, deep freezes and Chesterfields (that's sofas to us).
"It's a great old plane," he says.
Aird has the individual history and photos of more than 1,200 Beavers on his site, with new entries turning up all the time. There are several in Oregon, he says, including one in Burns, one in Eagle Creek and a few in Portland. To see Aird's online project on the Beavers, go to dhc-2.com.
-- Laurie Robinson
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