Reviews for Otter and Twin Otter: The Universal Airplanes

The average rating for Otter and Twin Otter: The Universal Airplanes based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-11 00:00:00 George Stagnaro This is a great history of de Havilland Canada and how it came to make the Otter and the Twin Otter. Along the way, it also tells the story of several other planes: Beaver, Caribou, Buffalo. Only 844 Twin Otters were produced, but they have a way of still showing up in all the most out-of-the-way places. Their STOL performance and their ruggedness are characteristics that make them useful in primitive circumstances. Many are float planes, used in places with no runways. The unexpected reward in this book is the story of Otter 3682, an experimental STOL aircraft I had never heard of. At first it had one radial engine, later two turbo props. The most amazing was its J-85 jet engine within the fuselage, with reversible thrust used to assist takeoff and steepen landing approach. The thrust was delivered through two nozzles, one out each side of the plane. Apparently the landing approach was so steep as to be absolutely terrifying for any pilot, even though he had been forewarned. There was only one copy made, and development stopped in 1963, even though its performance was incredible.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-06 00:00:00 Russell Cartledge This book must've taken forever to research, with so many archival photos and such a vast bibliography at the back. It may be only a short book of 90 pages, but the information is very densely packed and tightly laid out. Consequently, this is a great book for researchers of these particular planes, pilots, squadrons and battles, but less accessible to the average reader, making for stodgy, hard-going text. The verbatim quotations from flying logs and pilots makes for particularly interesting reading, but understandably, during these and the rest of the body text from the outset, enemy aircraft are named as CR42s, S79s, Ca133s and G50s, so unless the reader has a copy of Jane's on their bedside table, they are unlikely to know them all by heart. Some kind of reference page would've been a useful addition, as would a small map here and there for the less-familiar parts of British Somaliland and the Northern Finland-Russian border. The colour plates are beautifully drawn, but the information that pertains to them is 40 pages away, which seems oddly inconvenient. Typos are not rare either - there is even one on the back cover. I wanted to like this more than I did, but it is a valuable reference book to the right audience. 3.25/5