F&S Classics: One Tough Plane

Here I go again. I was commissioned to do a painting of the estate of some well to do people and I had the fortune to fly right seat in their personal Beaver on floats . I knew their personal pilot so it was a treat all the way around. The destination was in the Canadian Queen Charolette Islands so I got a lot of in-air stick time. I wasn't allowed to make a landing but I was hands-on the rest of the time. I had the feeling that the Beaver was a big Cub. No vices, smooth, responsive, and just a nicely balanced comfortable airplane. On the return trip I commented that the DME wasn't working right because we had an indicated ground speed of 40mph. Mike, the pilot , said that it was about correct since the headwinds were pretty strong in this area. He advised climbing to 7000 and it did help some. It was interesting that there was no turbulence, just fast moving air like a wind tunnel with no terrain roughness under it. A lot of the well-to-do people in Seattle own Beavers on floats and I can see why. A beautiful airplane and a worthy status symbol.

 

The Beavers are a baked-in part of the Pacific northwest. I live on an island waterfront; Kenmore normally has 5 or 6 every day overhead. I can hear them long before/after I see them
I have 2 neighbors who fly theirs in to their docks.

The turbine Beavers of course sound distinctly different.

 

I spent four days in Ketchikan in 2016, and one thing that struck me was how busy the channel set aside for floatplane use was, all day long. I'd say the traffic was about equally divided between Beavers (all still radial-powered) and Otters (all turbine-powered) with a fair number of Cessnas thrown in, but almost nothing else. At certain times of the day, the "runway" looked about as busy as those at ATL!

 

I got to thinking about the Beaver and got to chuckling about an incident when we were returning from the Merced Antique Fly In in the 60's. We were in low visibility near Castle Rock, Wa. following the upper Columbia River and 500ft over I-5 when I heard a loud prop and looked over to see an Army Beaver flying along side me in the L-3. Nose up, flaps deployed, and in fine pitch. Pilot and copilot frantically thumbing through a book and looking at our 28 year old L-3 restored to its original 1942 como and probably wondering what the hell they had run across. They finally powered up and went on their way leaving us to continue our 70mph journey. Wouldn't it be nice to have that Beaver now?

 

...... at not much more than 100mph themselves......