Ode to the Dash8

This past week I was on a business trip that had me on six different flight segments.  That in itself is not all that unusual, but three of those flights were on "Dash8" aircraft.  I fly on these quite a bit and I started to wonder about the popularity of this aircraft, so I thought I would do and share some research.

I know that somewhere in my travels, I have heard that the "Dash8" (shown at left) was actually an acronym for "de Havilland Air Short Haul version 8 (D.A.S.H.8), but I have found no evidence that is actually true, however it certainly could be from the information I uncovered.  Officially the plane is called a "Dash8" because the official designation is DHC-8 (pronounced: Dee Aech See DASH eight) and it has no other nickname like most of it's predecessors the DHC-1 through DHC-7.  The Dash8's immediate predecessor, the DHC-7 was also referred to by a similar name, "Dash7" and was built as a commercial carrier with a very Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) capability.  Fully loaded, it could lift off in only 610 metres (about 2000 ft) which is pretty amazing for any commercial aircraft.

   

The earlier DHC-6 (image on right) is more commonly known as the "Twin Otter" which will be very familiar to people who often take short hauls from Vancouver to Victoria, or from Toronto to Ottawa.  These commercial "Short Hauls" are a difficult market niche for aircraft manufacturers because they have to balance agility with maintenance costs.  The Dash-7 was popular at the time, but was quickly replaced by the Dash-8 due to it's lower maintenance costs and comparable STOL capability.  The Dash-8 can lift off in only 910 metres of runway (about 3000ft) which is considerably less than the comparably sized CRJ200 which requires about double that (1835 metres).


The "short haul" legacy of the Dash-8 has a familiar successful legacy in the DHC-5 (left) which people in forest fire territory will recognize as the "Buffalo" as well as the DHC-4 "Caribou" (shown below) that earned a place in history for short haul work supplying troops in Vietnam.


The Dash-8 actually comes in 4 distinct flavours including the popular Q400 which is actually the "Dash-8 type 400", a 78 passenger version of the original.  Even Westjet, who's entire fleet consists of Boeing 737's, just placed a conditional order for twenty Q400s to add to their fleet.  Bombardier passed the 1000 unit mark of deliveries of "dash8" aircraft over 2 years ago and they still keep shipping.

An interesting note to this is that even though the Dash8-400 (AKA the Q400) is a brand new aircraft, the Dash8-100 first shipped in 1983 - Twenty Nine years ago - and many of those early birds are still in the air (I think I was on one today).

Anyway, I spend quite a bit of time in that particular make of aircraft and thought I might share some of the detail around why it is so pervasive in the short haul markets.

Hope you had fun reading about it :)