B&N design methods ensured a lower cost than other planemakers, one of the reasons for itsa success. All ‘fancy bits’ were excluded at the design stage. Perhaps that is why it became such an enduring design.

A couple facts follow about the Islander design you may not know, from my distant memory of an RAE lecture given at BAe Weybridge by one of the designers (Britten or Norman, can’t remember which one).

All rivet pitches were the same all over the aircraft, and the plane was sized to suit this rivet pitch instead of working out different pitches for each location. For this feature, ‘one pitch’ metal templates were made for the draughtsmen, and the same templates were used by the people who built the planes.

The designer angered our draughtsmen by saying that all aircraft designers loved drawing nuts, bolts and the like – so he forbade his designers to do that!

The cabin was made just the right width for a standard ‘barrel’ of oil, an important consideration for Islanders of the human kind!

Bri 🙂