Islander in the Sky

It seems to have been around forever. The classic piston twin workhorse, slugging away in remote areas, on poor quality airstrips, in the tropics, in the deserts, and in the big city airports. That familiar aircraft is the Britten-Norman Islander.

While the Islander is quite familiar, the company Britten-Norman is not. It is based in the most unlikely of aircraft manufacturing locations: the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. In perhaps a sad reflection on the demise of the British aircraft industry, Britten-Norman is now the only privately-owned commercial aircraft producer in the UK.

Beginnings

John Britten and Desmond Norman, who worked together at de Havilland, formed the company in the early 1950s to convert Tiger Moths for crop-dusting (for export to New Zealand). That work led them to develop the Micronair Rotary Atomiser for spraying, and this unit proved very successful. The Atomiser was spun off into a part-subsidiary called Crop Culture (Aerial). Britten and Norman started to pursue hovercraft, and build the Cushioncraft CC-1, reputed to be the second air-cushion vehicle to ever fly. By 1967, Britten and Norman were also running a commercial hovercraft service between the Isle of Wight and the English mainland, and they had sold their interests in Cushioncraft to British Hovercraft Corporation.

Along the way, the pair had become involved, in 1960, in a small airline in Africa called Cameroon Air Transport. (The transport of bananas had originally been the motivation to develop their hovercraft.) Cameroon Air