Ask the bush pilots

In the autumn of 1946, de Havilland Canada did something no aircraft maker had quite done before: it asked its customers what to build. Punch Dickins, the company’s sales director and himself a famous bush pilot, went round the operators of the north collecting their wish lists. On 17 September 1946 a design team of Fred Buller, Dick Hiscocks, Jim Houston and the Polish engineer Wsiewołod Jakimiuk set to work under managing director Phil Garratt. The result, flown at Downsview by the wartime ace Russell Bannock on 16 August 1947, was the DHC-2 Beaver. It became the bush plane by which all others are judged.

Moths at De Lesseps Field

The company itself had humbler beginnings. The British de Havilland Aircraft Company set it up on 5 March 1928 to build Moth biplanes for training Canadian airmen, first at De Lesseps Field in Toronto and from 1929 at Downsview, the site that would be its home for more than ninety years. For a decade it was an outpost, assembling British designs for a small Canadian market. The Second World War changed its scale completely. Downsview turned out 1,747 Tiger Moths for the Commonwealth air training plan, and then something far more ambitious.

Mosquitoes over Downsview

That was the Mosquito, the wooden twin-engine bomber that could outrun most fighters. De Havilland Canada built 1,134 of them, a remarkable share of the more than 7,000 produced, and some 500 had reached Britain by the end of the war. Peace brought the first all-Canadian design, the DHC-1 Chipmunk trainer, flown on 22 May 1946. Some 1,283 were built in Canada, Britain and Portugal, and Prince Philip, who took his first flying lesson in one in 1952, called it his favourite aircraft.

The STOL family

The Beaver set the pattern: rugged, simple, able to get in and out of short, rough strips. The US Army alone bought 970 during the Korean War. The bigger single-engine Otter followed in 1951, then the twin-engine Caribou in 1958 and the Buffalo in 1964. The Twin Otter, first flown on 20 May 1965, became a legend in the polar regions; in 2001 one made the first winter flight into the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station to evacuate a sick doctor. The four-engine Dash 7 made the first landing at London’s Docklands in 1983.

Governments, Boeing and Bombardier

Ownership was never as steady as the aircraft. De Havilland Canada passed with its parent into Hawker Siddeley in 1960 and took over Avro Canada’s Malton plant in 1962. Ottawa bought it in 1974; Brian Mulroney’s government sold it to Boeing in 1986 for 155 million Canadian dollars. Boeing, which lost some 636 million US dollars in five years, sold out in 1992 to Bombardier and the Government of Ontario. Under Bombardier the Dash 8, which first flew on 20 June 1983, grew into the Q400; more than 1,250 Dash 8s had been built by 2019. But the de Havilland name itself vanished.

Back from the dead

The revival came from Victoria, British Columbia. Viking Air, founded there in 1970 by Nils Christensen to support old de Havilland types, bought the type certificates for every out-of-production DHC design from the Chipmunk to the Dash 7 in February 2006. In 2007 it did the unthinkable and put the Twin Otter back into production; the Series 400 flew on 1 October 2008. Its parent, Longview Aviation Capital, then bought Bombardier’s Canadair water bomber programme in 2016 and, on 3 June 2019, the Dash 8 programme and the de Havilland brand. In February 2022 the whole group became De Havilland Aircraft of Canada once more.

A new home on the prairie

The old Downsview works fell silent in 2022 and Dash 8 production was suspended. The company’s future now lies in Wheatland County, east of Calgary, where ground was broken on 15 May 2026 for De Havilland Field, a 1,500-acre site meant to build the Twin Otter, the Dash 8-400 and the DHC-515 Firefighter, the modernised Canadair water bomber. Twenty-two have been ordered by six European countries and five by Alberta, with Alberta’s first expected in 2031. A century after the Moths, the brand is back to building for the wild.

Fábricas

• De Lesseps Field · Toronto, Ontario — First home, 1928–1929
• Downsview plant · Toronto, Ontario — Main works from 1929; manufacturing ended in 2022
• Malton plant (former Avro Canada) · Malton, Ontario — Transferred to DHC by Hawker Siddeley in 1962
• Viking Air works · Victoria International Airport, North Saanich, British Columbia — Twin Otter Series 400 production from 2008
• De Havilland Field · Wheatland County, Alberta — 1,500-acre assembly, parts and MRO site; groundbreaking 15 May 2026

Pessoas

• Phil Garratt · managing director — Led the team that created the Beaver in 1946–1947
• C. H. “Punch” Dickins · bush pilot, director of sales — Gathered pilots’ requirements that shaped the Beaver
• Wsiewołod Jakimiuk · chief designer — Polish pre-war engineer who led the Chipmunk design and worked on the Beaver
• Russell Bannock · test pilot, wartime ace — Flew the Beaver’s first flight on 16 August 1947
• Nils Christensen · founder of Viking Air — Founded Viking in Victoria in 1970; the firm later revived the de Havilland Canada brand
• Brian Chafe · CEO — Leads the company into its Alberta era

Recordes e pioneirismos

• DHC-2 Beaver named one of the top ten Canadian engineering achievements of the 20th century, 1987
• Twin Otter made the first winter flight to the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, 2001
• Dash 7 made the first landing at London Docklands (Heron Quays), 1983
• Twin Otter returned to production in 2008, twenty years after the line closed
• The 22-aircraft European DHC-515 contract is the largest order in the company’s history