Thread: RAAF Caribou pilot, his story

Originally Posted by bob10

RAAF Caribou Pilot: New Guinea and Vietnam - YouTube

A brilliant aeroplane, Bob. I only ever flew as a passenger in one a few times when I was in the Airforce Cadets as a kid. Great experience...
I never pictured actually flying the natural evolution of this plane (DHC-8) 20 years later. I loved flying it. A great STOL aeroplane, well built and super reliable.

As far as I know, the main reason for the Caribou going out of service was that the required fuel was getting to be a bit hard to find. 115/145, I think, although they could presumably run on 100LL if boost was limited.

Pretty much the Land Rover of the skies.

Slow, noisy, and seemed to be underpowered, but they always got there in the end! And the people working them really liked them!

I spent some time at RAAf Darwin some of the most memorable things I did were flights in Caribous. One was a maintenance trip from Darwin to RAAF Learmonth via RAAF Curtin. Due to the long hours (we averaged 70-80 knots) and lack of auto pilot the pilots took turns letting us passengers fly the aircraft. Things I remember most (besides flying for a couple of hours) was the heat when we landed at Curtin, the large amount of oil the engines consumed

Another time the Caribous hadn't used enough hours so they were doing flights out of Darwin and I went on a short flight. As there was only a couple of passengers and the crew and no cargo we took very little runway before being airborne. We put on harnesses and clipped in and they lowered the rear cargo door and we stood at the back as we flew down a river at low level, it was quite a view.

I spent some time talking to the pilots and they really enjoyed flying the Caribous and thought they were a great aircraft but it could get a bit tedious on long flights.

I didn't know there was a caribou 2, called the buffalo, with more powerful engines.

www.airvectors.net/avdhc4.html

Wallaby airlines Vietnam.

Wallaby airlines | The Australian War Memorial

Originally Posted by bob10

I didn't know there was a caribou 2, called the buffalo, with more powerful engines.

www.airvectors.net/avdhc4.html

Yes, and also bigger. almost twice the MTOW at 49,000lbs. They appear to have put a lot of effort into ensuring it had similar field performance to the Caribou, perhaps resulting in excessive cost. It was never anywhere near as popular as the Caribou, possibly because of cost or perhaps engine choice.

Interestingly, Viking Air is reported by Wikipedia to be offering a modernised version, having acquired all the DHC 1-7 type certificates from Bombardier.