Heck, why not go with a proven airfcraft?

The Canadian Air Force's Northern Utility Aircraft (currently the Twotter) is now not scheduled for replacement for quite some time. Why not take a flyer?

A Canadian marvel, the Twin Otter is still flying high

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When I first flew on a de Havilland Twin Otter 30-odd years ago in the Northwest Territories, the nimble and sturdy Canadian design was already making a name for itself as the king of the bush planes.

On floats, fat tires for soft ground and skis for the interminable winter, the Twin Otter was proving to be a worthy successor to de Havilland's Otter and the already legendary Beaver.

This fur farm of flying machines owned most of the territory off the beaten track, reliably inserting and extracting trappers, prospectors and adventurers from map coordinates that will likely never be served by a road or airport.

They remain a familiar sight in British Columbia, as a portal to wild places while also serving as the mainstay for scheduled service to remote communities and the wet entrances to downtown Vancouver and Victoria.

Now the old plane is new again.

Last week, a new Twin Otter took off for the first time from the Victoria airport. To the untrained eye, other than for a longer nose, it didn't look much different from the first Twin Otter that took off for the first time on a test flight from the de Havilland plant in the Toronto suburb of Downsview 43 years earlier.

The Twin Otter premiered before the first trip to the moon, before CD players, microwave ovens, before personal computers and the Internet, when Detroit was the undisputed capital of the automotive world.

Remarkably, the airplane designed by Canadian aeronautical engineers almost half a century ago is still essentially the state-of-the-art solution to the tasks it was built to take on...

By the time the de Havilland Twin Otter production line was shut down in 1988, 844 had been delivered to customers in more than 80 countries. About 600 of those are still flying, as are majority of the Chipmunks, a trainer produced between 1946 and 1956, the Beavers, Buffalos and Otters.

They have been kept aloft with the help of a Victoria company that saw a bright future in aging airplanes. Viking Air Ltd. started by manufacturing parts and refurbishing old planes.

In 2005, it acquired the rights to build and market the discontinued models from Bombardier and launched its plan to build them in Victoria and Calgary, where some final assembly will be done.

In an interview from Florida, where the new plane is being shown off at the National Business Aviation Association annual meeting, Viking president Dave Curtis says it was market position, not just superior engineering that persuaded Viking to start production on the Twin Otter, rather than any of the other heritage designs, even though the others are still flying.

Essentially, no other manufacturers have gone after the niche market the Twin Otter still holds, because development costs of a totally new design, which Curtis estimates at $200 million, cannot be recouped from the 40 or so planes he believes they can sell on an annual basis.

Among the customers ready to show that they believe the Twin Otter is still at the head of its class was the U.S. Army, which has ordered three for use by its elite parachute team [emphasis added].

The Canadian military is still operating Twin Otters. It had planned to replace the four stationed in Yellowknife, which are already 40 years old, but now plans to keep them flying through 2015...

More:

First flight for new Twin Otter a "boring" success
Test flight marks new era in Canadian aviation