What is this plane? #18

[howardwhite 5]

Hmm, four engines. Must have been a real perfomer, right.What, when, where?

HW
(who notes it's been mentioned here before, without pictures.) (And spelled wrong, so a simple search will fail.)
Edited to add: O.K. all you sharp eyes.. AP1 was flopped; replacement attached, along with another picture.
The N-number on my copy of AP1 is easily read, and I know who owned the plane at the time.

[jonstark 8]

Relatively speaking that's pretty recent. It's post-wingwar as the suits have started to shrink. The wings are gettin' gone but the stripes are still bulky and grips just starting to appear. I'll give it 1982-ish.

where/what event???

[Zing 2]

DeHavilland 114 Heron

I remember one that was no longer flying parked at SLC Airport #2 in the mid-80s that was supposedly jumped a few times.

Seems to me Larry Bagley used to have a jumpsuit something like that white one with blue stripes in the second photo.

Zing Lurks

[mccurley 0]

DC 4

Watch my video Fat Women
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRWkEky8GoI

[darkwing 4]

I've jumped a Dehaviland Heron, DH-114, and that was my first notion too, but I've got some doubts. I looked at a photo I found elsewhere, and there seem to be some differences.

The one I jumped was mid-1980s in Missouri.

-- Jeff
My Skydiving History

[JSBIRD 1]

DeHaviland Dove.

BASE359

"Now I've settled down,
in a quiet little town,
and forgot about everything"

[mccurley 0]

This is a dove.

We are just starting the earth works for a new hangar for one of these and a couple of other classic aircraft here in Tauranga NZ.
This will be the 34th hangar I have designed & built for this airport.

Watch my video Fat Women
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRWkEky8GoI

[howardwhite 5]

Well, a Dove has two engines, as your pictures indicate, and a DC-4 has radial engines, so I would be inclined to rule out both of them.

Note that I have edited my original post, fixing one picture and adding another.

HW

[mccurley 0]

The Dove phoyos where a response to JSBird's post above me.
I still think the wing profile looks very DC ish maybee a 6 or 7 if not a 4

Watch my video Fat Women
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRWkEky8GoI

[rapter 0]

But look at the main gear

Only the good die young, so I have found immortality,

[pchapman 262]

I'd go for the DH Heron answer --
but one of those converted from the inline Gipsy engines to the flat Lycoming engines.

The tightly cowled engines have a distinctive shape around the exhausts especially.

The designers went for four smaller engines rather than 2 bigger engines.

Then I really cheated and checked airliners.net. Looks like the paint scheme of Wright Airlines, who owned 5 of them.

[piper17 1]

I'd go with "Riley Turbo Heron", a Dehavilland Heron converted to Lycoming IO 540 engines.

"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition"...Rudyard Kipling

[howardwhite 5]

You would go exactly right. The plane is N414SA. It was one of several Herons operated by Swift Aire Lines, a commuter airline based in San Luis Obispo and operating internal California routes between 1969 and 1981, when it went belly-up.
Riley took the grossly underpowered Heron (which was based on the Dove) and made it slightly less underpowered by installing IO-540s.
N414 ended its days in Fiji. It crashed Dec. 27, 1986 near Naji, Fiji, apparently as the result of a malfunction in which the flaps extended unevenly. Eleven of 14 on board died.
Which doesn't answer my original question of where and when it was jumped. But this post may help:
http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2942707;search_string=herron;#2942707
It confirms darkwing's memory about the spar.
Attached is another Swift Heron picture.

(Perhaps more than you wanted to know.)

HW

[Bsquared 0]

I made a number of jumps from this a/c at the Mardi Gras boogie in Covington LA in the mid 1980's. I heard that its jump ship career ended shortly after that. On one jump I tripped when my shoelace snagged on a rivet while climbing over the spar and I had to really hustle down to do my "hero" back-in on a 16 way diamond.

[howardwhite 5]

I showed the picture to Larry Bagley today. He said he didn't remember the plane at SLC Airport #2 when he ran it, and it's not him in the white jumpsuit.

HW

[riggerrob 558]

Similarly, in the early 1980s, I flew in a commuter Saunder ST-27 from Montreal to Ottawa.
The Saunders T-27 was a second attempt at up-engining DeHavilland Herons. A Canadian company removed the four inline engines, and outboard nacelles. Then they installed a pair of PT6A-? turboprops in the inboard nacelles.
That converted it into a decent commuter liner on a par with Beechcraft 99s.

As far as I know, all the Saunders ST-27s have retired to museums.