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That was my 1st thought exactly! Fixed gear and all.Twin Otter! Which it more than a little resembles, and which is still in production, since 1965! Of course the Pilatus PC-12 as well as the Cessna Caravan fit in that market as well.
It just goes to show you that a "dated" design using "old technology" is nothing to turn your nose up at. It's hard to imagine anything that would be better than an A-10 for its missions, but that does not prevent dumasses from asserting it's old fashioned and we should not be flying it.
In 1957 we were flying Atlas and Thors with LOX/Kerosene engines. It was "obvious" a few years later that N2O4 and A-50 was more advanced for rockets but today we are still flying LOX/Kerosene and those More Advanced storable fuels are almost gone.
Just the Twotter as a 19-seat twin turbo-prop competitor then. Plenty of airlines won't use single-engine aircraft for IFR operations.Twin Otter! Which it more than a little resembles, and which is still in production, since 1965! Of course the Pilatus PC-12 as well as the Cessna Caravan fit in that market as well.
I am sure than any resemblance of that airplane to the MU-2 is purely a coincidence.
If something works for a specific purpose, no need to reinvent it
While I guess this looks like an old design, I expect that there are a lot of modern methods in it, and everything is there for a reason.Ever heard of modernisation? Reduction of number of parts, manpower in maintenance, construction time etc compared to its nearest competitor? What about anticipating a need for when older designs leave specific markets and require immediate successors, what about the desire for sales because a company is good at a particular niche? Lots'a reasons why a company might want to bring an aircraft or a thing into the world.
Let's also say that the B737 Max was a good reason why Boeing should have built an entirely new airframe instead of upgrading the basic 737.
It's a plane for a job...
but Warsaw Pact maintenance philosophy considered it better to just swap out an engine with 1500 hours or so on it rather than overhaul it.
Be interesting to put the numbers for the new Cessna next to those for a DC-3 and compare them.
The problem of modernization nowadays is that we're past the point of major improvements in many fields of engineering and, sometimes, instead of the expected diminishing returns you have when you improve the same basic concept times and again, you get unexpected, potentially catastrophic, troubles.Ever heard of modernisation? Reduction of number of parts, manpower in maintenance, construction time etc compared to its nearest competitor? What about anticipating a need for when older designs leave specific markets and require immediate successors, what about the desire for sales because a company is good at a particular niche? Lots'a reasons why a company might want to bring an aircraft or a thing into the world.
Let's also say that the B737 Max was a good reason why Boeing should have built an entirely new airframe instead of upgrading the basic 737.
Consider the pedestrian bridge they built at the University of Miami. A conventional design was rejected as being "banal." They went with a more exciting design that collapsed and killed people before it was even finished. Saw on TV where another university wanted a pedestrian bridge over a ravine and decided to match the wooded area and make it out of wood, a wooden bridge with a reinforced concrete deck. It also collapsed before it was opened.The problem of modernization nowadays is that we're past the point of major improvements in many fields of engineering