In 1991, Bobby Bishop and his father were operating a skydiving operation out of Celina, Texas. They had a Cessna 182, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter, a DC-3 and a de Havilland Caribou. But they wanted something in between the Porter and the DC-3/Caribou size aircraft. A de Havilland Twin Otter didn’t seem cost-effective, and the single-engine Otter — even one with a 750 shaft-horsepower (shp) conversion — didn’t have quite the power they wanted.
“We said, ‘What we really need is an Otter with a 1,000 hp engine,'” Bishop remembers.
