A Caravan EXperience
It has been said before that you should never meet your heroes. The inference is that you'll find out they are ordinary people with a less heroic side to them that may extinguish your adulation and have you wondering why you ever worshipped them in the first place. It’s a philosophy that could be applied easily to aircraft. What if the aeroplane you lusted after so much in your early days turned out to be a dream-busting disappointment?
One of my own hero aeroplanes has always been the Cessna C208 Caravan. Introduced in 1984, only one year before I logged my first flying hour, it was seen as a radical departure from the established charter and short-haul airline paradigms. One engine, high-wing, turbine; it couldn't have been more different from the low-wing piston twins that had dominated those markets for the previous 20-odd years.
Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought the Caravan was the duck’s guts; it was a winner from the moment it left the blocks and there are now around 2500+ of them operating in most countries. Missionary work, short-haul RPT, cargo, parachuting, aeromedical, military, surveillance; the C208 rarely fails at any assigned task.
For me, a lowly piston-pulled PPL of bog-stock nature, the Caravan has always been an aeroplane on a pedestal too high to reach … until one day last September at a wind-blown Essendon Airport when Textron Aviation pointed me towards the latest version of this legendary GA workhorse, the C208B Grand Caravan EX.
