Air Medical of Oxford in the UK has bought a new Cessna Caravan specifically for the cargo market and is planning to add several more. Managing director and chief pilot Rob Paris told EBAN: “We see

single engine turbines as being a good way forward for us – certainly on the cargo side and possible on survey. I would be very surprised if we haven’t got half a dozen of them within two or three years.”

He continued: “We decided to buy this aircraft about a year ago, as soon as we realised that the single engine IMC ruling was to be changed.

“The cargo we do at the moment with our Piper Senecas and Chieftains is mostly car spares but we’re looking at moving more into parcels, mail and newspapers.

There’s an existing marketplace for this type of cargo which is being serviced by aircraft like Bandeirantes but the Caravan I, in my opinion, can service that more efficiently and more cheaply.”

Before Air Med (as it prefers to be known) paid in the region of £1 million for the aircraft, Paris says he looked at several different options but kept coming back to the Caravan. He said: “Nothing else came up with the right numbers to enable us to operate in this sort of size (up to one and a half tonnes) economically with a very long-range and reasonable speed.

“We looked at Titans, Caravan IIs and Shorts 330s and none of them had the same performance figures.”

Asked about the Caravan’s best asset, he said: “The ability to carry a tonne of cargo out of the Midlands and take it to Gibraltar without stopping. Not many machines will do that.

“You can take up a tonne and a half of cargo for relatively short distances – across to Paris, for example – but it really comes into its own on the longer runs where you can fill the tanks, put a tonne of goods onboard and fly for seven hours. It’s a brilliant machine.”

Air Med is currently going through the UK certification process but won’t be using the aircraft until the change in the single engine IMC rule, which it anticipates in September of this year.

Said Paris: “Until then, we’ll be doing crew training – both our own crew and outside people. We’ve got quite a big demand of pilots who want to become class and type rated on this machine.”

In addition to the cargo work the company carries out, Air Med also works in the fields of air taxi and air ambulance. Paris says their five Senecas and three Chieftains are busy most days and carry out missions across Europe. he said: “Today, we’ve done three cargo jobs in the Senecas – one to Claremont, one to Rotterdam and one to Eindhoven. We’ve also had an ambulance and air taxi job today.”

As regards the potential market for passengers in the Caravan, Paris said: “We don’t see the public accepting single engine use for a few years yet. Whilst we’re confident that it’s a very safe machine and the Civil Aviation Authority agree with us – which is why they’re allowing it to be used for public transport in IMC – the public don’t know much about aviation but they count up to two.”

Air Medical started in 1987 purely as a specialist air ambulance operator. About a third of Air Med’s work is now in this field, while a third is in cargo and a further third in air taxi.