Low, Slow & Selling

In the jet age, Britten-Norman Ltd. seems almost an anachronism. The airstrip at the company's plant near the resort town of Bembridge on Britain's Isle of Wight is nothing but a sod runway. The one plane that Britten-Norman builds carries ten people in a fuselage that even its designers admit is "just an aluminum rack." It has a high, slablike wing and a top speed of only 168 m.p.h. Yet low and slow as it flies, the Britten-Norman (BN-2) Islander, as it is called, has proved to be a soaring success.

Aimed at local air-taxi outfits, which have sprung up around the world to serve the short runs now spurned by big jets, the Islander is in remarkable demand. Since the first production model appeared barely 18 months ago, 16 air-taxi companies have put the plane into service from Scotland's Orkney Islands to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. More than 200, worth a total of $15 million, are now on order, and production is sold out well into 1969. With 800 workers straining to increase the Islander's one-a-week rate, Britten-Norman Co-Founder Desmond Norman's main concern is to find "ways to build them fast enough."

Necessary Frenzy. The Islander is only the second plane designed by Norman and Partner John Britten, both 39 years old. Giving up temporarily after their one previous effort, a 1949 single-seater that flew "like a crippled bird," the two partners began to concentrate on building up what became a worldwide crop-spraying business. They were waiting, says Norman, "until we could see a really good gap in the market before working ourselves up into the necessary frenzy to build another plane."

The gap appeared, improbably enough, in the Cameroons. There, while investigating a surge in charters of their crop-dusters, Britten and Norman found that the planes were being used to fill an air-travel void left by the retirement of World War II-vintage DC-3s. The partners wasted no time in starting a study of air-taxi services in all parts of the world. What they found was that the average flight was less than 50 miles. The high speed (180 m.p.h. and up) of the typical four-to-five-passenger, $70,000 executive plane then in use on most such runs hardly made sense to them. So they drew up plans for the Islander, a plane that would cost about the same as the small executive jobs, yet be three times as economical to fly (50 per seat mile v. 160) as its nearest ten-seat competitor.

Simple Ingenuity. Necessarily, the Islander is ingeniously simple in design. To save the cost and weight of a retraction system, the landing gear is fixed. To save cabin space, there is no aisle; passengers must climb into their seats through three fuselage doors. To offer performance comparable to STOL (short takeoff and landing) planes such as the $85,000 U.S.-made Helio Twin Courier, the Islander has outsized wings that permit takeoffs in a bare 520 ft., landings at 65 m.p.h. All in all, the Islander offers only one frill; though one big engine would theoretically offer reliability enough, the plane has two 260-h.p. Lycoming engines to allow for the customer confidence factor. Measured by customer response, that was a wise decision.

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