Approved as requested.
I’ll take 5 legs on my home turf all day and twice on Sunday. Familiarity reduces wear and tear. I know exactly what’s going to happen and when. All the freqs are stored up in the home dome, and when someone says they’re Crystal Lake for 5, I know where they are.
Change my mind - the optimal leg length is approximately 45 minutes.
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Kinda blurry cuz I had to dig it up from instagram but this is a classic from the Navajo days. I’m pretty sure I had a 15 or 16 leg day in the Cherokee at some point but that doesn’t compare in workload to the mighty ‘Jo.
I think (think) my record for legs was JNU-HNH-GST-JNU basically all day one day in the summer of 2009 or 2010. That whole trip is like 1 hour or whatever, and I did it 7 or 8 times... With the one off HNH trip on the way back or whatever I think I finished the day with 26 legs?
For me, the caravan was aesthetically almost perfect.
Now that I'm out of it and can talk •, I hated the • caravan. It's ugly, boring, and hurts your back. For those without the experience of the machine, here's my take:
The 600SHP bird is basically all the bad parts of the 207 combined with none of the delightful parts of the sled and with just enough extra HP to make you think you're invincible but not enough to actually save your ass.
The 675SHP van is basically just an experimental icing platform to see how far a seat-cushion can be wedged into the pilot-in-command's rectum during the winter months. If a snow-flake hits the wing and you haven't just slathered the wings in icex, you lose 20kts. The boots are just for show in any real icing and the principle strategy for success is probably just to fly in places without big rocks.
The EX, with the TKS and the 867SHP motor and G1000 is what the airplane should have been from the start, very capable, but TKS is still scary when you run out of it over the Alaska range (even if it is summer) and I'm sure breathing that stuff in is probably contraindicated for continuing to survive. Also, like every other • caravan it's bad for your back.
The Aerotwin 950 caravan is better, but the prop turns the wrong way and if you try to climb out at Vx when empty the nose will be so high it's scary. It shakes a bit too; efficent but ugly and loud. Plan on being an experimental test pilot if you fly one. Also, what's one more fishbox between friends?
In all of the caravans you can basically plan on not having a lower-back if you're moving fishboxes or mail. In 2018 I had to get a lumber punch done and the gal doing the punch said, "Oh, were you a caravan pilot or did you work as an electrician?" Apparently, the airplane is bad enough for your back that the doctor can recognize it while she's doing the work of shoving a needle into your spine.
Then there's the boredom. The caravan is insidiously boring too, because it's really • boring until it suddenly isn't. It's a mind-numbing excercise in the same • over and over again until suddenly it becomes very no-•-exciting-right-goddamn-now. As you can imagine this airplane can make you dumb AF because it has fixed landing gear, dirt simple procedures, and flies like a 182. That's fantastic for training, and also fantastic because you can basically not think about anything at all and successfully manage to move semi-truck quantities of dog food and fishboxes around without dying. This is bad however because when you suddenly really need to think about something you may have trouble remembering how.
To contrast with the utter boring characteristics of flying the damn thing the manufacturers decided to make 14 memory items. As if to warn you, "this thing may seem boring as hell - and it is - but think of all the things that
could go wrong!" Don't worry though, none of those 1960s style emergencies are likely to occur. If anything you'll spend most of your brain power trying to think about if it is safe to take off 400lbs out of balance between the wings because in the 8 minutes your were on the ground in Tugonminutsaq somehow 60 • gallons went from one wing to the other because you forgot to close the fuel valves. Or you might wonder if it's reasonable to just pack the last 1000lbs of • into the pod and takeoff so you don't have to make one more trip. Other brain teasers include trying to see how a tiny VG on the leading edge of the wing allows for you to increase max takeoff weight by a couple hundred pounds, why anyone thought that spoilers for additional roll-control were a good idea on an already ponderously slow thick-winged airplane they were planing on operating in icing, or how stupid the sumps are on the airplane and how stupid the entire concept of an "epa can" is?
The Caravan was fine... but I'd say it was one of the least interesting things I operated for money.
(I actually have no idea if this is true, I just have the irrational urge to yell at clouds and complain about the generation behind mine) But thanks, to your friends, for setting that parenting precedent 
