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How Viking Air Builds a de Havilland Twin Otter

David Godsall

| September 8, 2011

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The Foyer at Viking Air

Occupying a two-story wall in the foyer of the Saanich head office, a rendering of one of the original de Havilland Twin Otter drawings reminds Viking workers of their plane's heritage. And the headaches involved in getting it off the ground. When Viking acquired the rights to build the plane (called the type certificate), the drawings arrived by the truckload. Precision blueprints they were not – more like sketches.

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Twin Otter Wing Strut Assembly

An assembly worker rivets wing struts for the Series 400 Twin Otter. Even with the most modern computer-aided manufacturing techniques, working with the thin sheets of aluminum that form the aircraft's skin requires a hands-on approach.

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Twin Otter Wing Assembly

Viking's Saanich facility, tucked in behind the Victoria airport, handles parts manufacturing and assembly. For final assembly, the parts are shipped to Viking's Calgary facility. Entire wings count as parts, though – the bulk of the real work is done on the Island.

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A Workbench at Viking Air

This might look more like how model airplanes are made than part of a modern aircraft manufacturing process, but much of the detailed work in Viking's parts facility is done at a bench like this using hand tools.

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Viking Air's Young Workforce

Finding skilled, experienced workers will be one of Viking's biggest challenges as the company looks toward scaling up its operations in the future. While postwar-era de Havilland had its pick of grey-haired craftsmen, many Viking workers are fresh out of trade school.

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Viking's Antique Aluminum Roller

Viking uses tools like sophisticated computer modeling software to make their manufacturing process more efficient. In some cases, however, they have no choice but to use the same equipment their de Havilland forebears used a half-century ago. This antique aluminum roller, for instance, is still the only tool for the job.

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A Computer-guided Router

The most intricate pieces of aluminum are cut out from sheets using a router guided by computer models of each part. This process enables the precision and repeatability that make the assembly process a lot less hammer-and-swearing-intensive than it would otherwise be.

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A Twin Otter Series 400 Flight Deck

Knowledge and experience are shared as assembly workers put together a Series 400 flight deck. Currently, Viking is able to produce about one new plane per month, but they hope to reduce that time by about a week. Figuring out how to build airplanes quickly takes time.

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An Old Twin Otter, Mid-Overhaul

Viking began in 1979 as a repair and overhaul shop for de Havilland aircraft, and with so many old Otters still in use whose owners are willing to pay to keep them aloft, space is always tight in the Second-World-War-era overhaul hangar. The nose-to-tail overhauls that Viking was doing on a regular basis were so comprehensive that they might as well have been building them from scratch. In fact, that's how they got the idea.

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Replacing the Belly Skin on a Twin Otter Series 300

This older Series 300 Twin Otter is in the middle of a belly skin replacement. The painful-sounding procedure is one of the many expensive age-defying surgeries greying birds are subjected to. But, alas, they can't cheat time. Each airframe has a maximum number of flight hours beyond which it's irreversibly grounded, regardless of the money spent keeping it youthful.

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A Twin Otter's Turboprop Engine

This 750-horsepower Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6-A 34 turboprop engine is one of two mounted on the wings of Peru's new Series 400 Twin Otter. The PT6 family of engines, first developed in the 1950s, are famous for their reliability even in extreme environments.

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Peru's New Viking Twin Otter

A representative of the Peruvian government inspects the first of the 12 new Twin Otters that country purchased to be complete. The final inspection isn't just ceremonial. Tape on the ground in the Viking hangar designates a perimeter within which no one other than the Peruvian inspectors is permitted to step, so as to ensure that there's no interference with the process. (BCBusiness learned the hard way that this rule is taken very seriously.) It's no wonder – flying a brand new plane from Victoria to South America must be a slightly nerve-wracking.

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Twin Otter Series 400 Floats

This set of Series 400 floats is destined for Avwest, a small charter service based in Perth, Australia. Customers from Indonesia (Airfast Indonesia has ordered four) to the Maldives (Maldivian Air Taxi and Trans Maldivian Airways have ordered seven between them) are snapping up the new Twin Otter because its combination of short-takeoff-and-landing prowess, payload and amphibious capability make it uniquely well-suited to passenger service in watery places.

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The Viking Twin Otter Series 400 Prototype

A Series 400 prototype undergoing auto-pilot testing at the Victoria Airport. The rolling pastoral landscape of the Saanich Peninsula make for a nice place to make airplanes.

Back to the September 2011 story, "Viking Air Resurrects the Twin Otter," by David Godsall

Tags
- Viking Air,
- de havilland,
- dave curtis,
- Businesses

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