Britten-Norman Islander

John Britten and Desmond Norman met as apprentices at de Havilland, built a light aircraft of their own in a shed on the Isle of Wight and in 1954 set up in business at Bembridge converting Tiger Moths for crop spraying. Flying their sprayers round the islands of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Guinea, they saw what the old Dragon Rapides and Herons were doing on short hops between poor strips and drew a replacement for them: a square-sided box of a fuselage seating ten in five rows, each pair of seats with its own door, a plain rectangular wing set high on the roof, two engines slung beneath it and a fixed undercarriage with twin wheels on each main leg. The prototype, G-ATCT, flew from Bembridge on 13 June 1965 on two 210 hp Continentals. It was underpowered, so the wing was stretched by four feet and 260 hp Lycoming O-540s fitted, and in that form the Islander was certificated on 10 August 1967. The first production aircraft went to Glos-Air three days later, and Loganair in Scotland and Aurigny in the Channel Islands had theirs before the year was out.

The Islander sold faster than a two-man company could build it. The fuselages and wings were made under contract by the British Hovercraft Corporation at East Cowes and later by IRMA in Bucharest, where more than 500 were built from 1969, and for a time by Fairey at Gosselies in Belgium, all of them flown to Bembridge to be finished. The money ran out all the same: Britten-Norman went into receivership in October 1971, Fairey bought the firm in 1972 and itself collapsed in 1977, and in 1979 the Swiss company Pilatus took it on as Pilatus Britten-Norman. Through all this the aircraft hardly changed. The BN-2A of 1969 brought the first improvements, the BN-2B of 1978 a higher landing weight and quieter propellers, and the BN-2T of 1980 swapped the Lycomings for Allison turboprops. The three-engined Trislander, which put a third Lycoming at the top of the fin and stretched the cabin to eighteen seats, flew on 11 September 1970 and sold seventy-odd, most of them to Aurigny.

More than 1,280 Islanders had been built by the 2020s and the type is still in production at Bembridge, the longest run of any British commercial aircraft. It is the aircraft of the small island: Loganair’s Islanders have flown the Orkney inter-isles service since 1967, including the Westray to Papa Westray hop, the shortest scheduled flight in the world, and from the same year they flew the Scottish air ambulance to the Hebrides and Northern Isles, taking the whole service over from BEA’s Herons in 1973 and keeping it until 2006. Police forces fly it with cameras and searchlights, the British Army’s Islander AL.1s flew over Northern Ireland for thirty years, and as the Defender it has served some thirty air forces. Islanders still cross the Channel from the Scillies, the Irish Sea to the islands off Donegal and the Pacific between the atolls, doing what Britten and Norman drew it to do.