Technology

The Fokker F27’s Historic Position In Home Icelandic Aviation

9 months ago 2 min read

The Fokker F27 Friendship was a driving drive through the post-war interval. Manufacturing of the turboprop began in 1955. Nonetheless, it will additionally see fame exterior its Dutch base. Notably, following a licensing settlement, North America’s Fairchild would additionally manufacture the plane.

A primary-hand peak

With a worldwide presence, this Fokker mannequin helped Iceland’s society and financial system adapt within the mid to late twentieth century. Alongside quite a few different historic plane, Easy Flying noticed a unit holding registration TF-SYN on the Icelandic Aviation Museum (also called Flugsafn Íslands in Icelandic) in Akureyri earlier this yr.

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Fokker produced this unit for the Icelandic coastguard in 1976. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the primary manufacturing of the Netherlands-based outfit to reach on the guard’s amenities. One other unit, TF-SYR, was delivered second-hand from Japan in 1972. It took over from the Douglas C-54 Skymaster in conducting search and rescue companies and fisheries monitoring.

Phrase from the museum

The Icelandic Aviation Museum shares that TF-SYN was deployed for long-distance service. The F27 tools additionally noticed exercise within the nation within the Sixties

The museum explains:

“TF-SYN is designed for long-haul flights. It has extra digital communication and positioning tools than is mostly present in related plane, in addition to full rescue tools.

“Fokker F-27 Friendskip engines have been first utilized in Iceland in 1965 and served in home flights till 1992 when the Fokker-50 took over.”

Loads of energy

Two Rolls-Royce 2,140 hp engines powered the F27-200, serving to to supply an endurance of 10 hours. The plane may fly to a variety of as much as 1,900 NM (3,500 km). It may additionally fly 5 folks, cut up between two crew members and three navigational officers. Nonetheless, the museum explains that as much as 9 folks would pack into the airplane throughout search and analysis missions.

It’s solely pure that the Fokker 50 took over. The plane carried out its first flight in December 1985 and was designed to be a extra fuel-efficient resolution on the time. New Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127B engines superior gas effectivity by 30%. Moreover, composites have been utilized over normal metallic to scale back the general weight.

In complete, 213 Fokker 50s have been produced between 1985 and 1997. Nonetheless, this system doesn’t evaluate to the F27s run of 586 items between 1955 and 1987. In any case, the airplane was a favourite amongst a number of operators throughout the globe.

Regardless of the F27 sort first flying in 1955 and getting into service in 1958, the plane proved to be a beneficial software for Iceland a number of years later. The deployed continued deploying the airplane a long time after this system started however relied on it for essential nationwide companies.

What are your ideas in regards to the Fokker F27 Friendship? What do you make of the general historical past of the plane in Iceland? Tell us what you consider the airplane and its operations over time within the remark part.