This story first ran in the May 2019 issue of EAA Sport Aviation.
Most de Havilland Beavers have quite a few hours on them, and for good reason. The Beaver is a rugged and useful type, popular for its STOL capabilities and performance on floats. Mark Stevens, EAA 1221078, bought his Beaver in 2016 with only around 4,000 hours on the airframe. That might seem like a lot, but a quick look at Barnstormers.com shows two Beavers for sale with more than 15,000 hours on the airframe and one with more than 30,000. So what’s Mark’s secret? His Beaver, N591DB, had survived with many of its components in boxes for decades before its restoration.
From the Army to the Garage
The Beaver has a distinguished history as a liaison aircraft with the designation L-20. Had it been developed a few years earlier, it would’ve certainly done some of the important work that the L-4 and L-5 handled for the Allies during World War II, including identifying targets for artillery fire; gathering intelligence above the battlefield; delivering supplies, couriers, and personnel; and search and rescue.
De Havilland Canada introduced the type in 1948 after it first flew in 1947. By the close of the 1960s, hundreds of L-20 Beavers were shipped to the U.S. Army, although a designation change meant they were called U-6s after 1962. The airplane now registered as N591DB, Army serial No. 58-1987, was among them. The Army took in 58-1987 in February 1959 after it first flew in January of that year, hence the numeral used in the airplane’s current N-number — 59 for the year and 1 for the month.
This was where Mark’s Beaver did all of its flying before the airplane got to him. N591DB was flown for roughly 10 years in the Lower 48 states by the Army. It was flown mostly around Virginia, with time in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Georgia as well.
After serving faithfully, N591DB was decommissioned and sent to Fort Rucker in Alabama, home of the Army flight training school known as Mother Rucker’s school of flying that produced pilots flying everything from L-19 Bird Dogs to Hueys. The United States Army Aviation Museum, which calls Fort Rucker home, was supposed to receive a Beaver to add to its collection. The problem was that only one Beaver was needed, but four ended up there.
“Three remained in that hangar from the late ’60s, early ’70s, until ’92 when someone with half a brain said, ‘Why are there three Beavers in that hangar?’ This is how the story goes,” Mark said. “At that time, everybody had no idea.”
The three extra Beavers were thus auctioned off. One of them wound up in British Columbia, Canada, after it was purchased in 1992 by a gentleman named Cham Gill. The plan was always for the Beaver to be rebuilt, but life reared its ugly head and got in the way as it so often does. N591DB sat in its box for another couple decades, patiently waiting for reassembly.
Cham realized he wouldn’t be the one to get the classic de Havilland airworthy again, so he posted it on Barnstormers.com in 2016. That’s where Mark comes in.
“I guess he woke up one day and said, ‘I’m not going to do anything with this. I might as well sell it,’” Mark said. “Well, I had been looking for one at the time.”
From the Marines to the Marina
Although not a pilot himself, Mark’s father’s involvement with the U.S. Marine Corps would prove foundational for his son, who watched P-3s, C-130s, A-4s, F-4s, and A-10s overhead when he was young.
“I was just always around it,” Mark said. “Lived 10 years on one end of the Navy base, not inside the fence. Literally 10 years on the threshold to Willow Grove Air Station in Pennsylvania, then the next 10 years on the other end of Willow Grove Air Station. So, we were always in the flight path and always went to air shows every year as a kid.”
Still, without a direct mentor in aviation, Mark was not able to dive into aviation right away. Although, he did get his private pilot certificate in his early 20s.
“My dad was in the Marine Corps, and he worked on aircraft and we were always around it [aviation],” Mark said. “I didn’t start flying until I got out of high school, I guess. I flew a little bit and then got married and started a family and started a business, just got away from it. Then a few years ago I decided to get back in, and I guess I got in in a big way.”
Mark’s first airplane was a SeaRey that he owned as part of a partnership. He partnered with some others on a Piper Archer as well. The freeing utility of seaplanes hooked Mark after his first experience with them.
“I went on hunting and fishing trips that used seaplanes and was attracted to the uniqueness of seaplane flying,” Mark said. “The first time I flew a seaplane, I felt a certain freedom having the ability to land on water.”
When a 1977 Cessna 185 became available, Mark moved on from both of his partnerships to buy it. Then, he saw an ad for what would become his Beaver.
Making the Deal
Mark had done prebuy inspections on several Beavers in neighboring Canadian cities leading up to finding N591DB, but none of them happened to match his vision. However, the online ad he saw for this Beaver enticed him, so he asked his friend Rob Richey, vice president of sales and consulting at Kenmore Air Harbor, to take a look.
His work at Kenmore meant Rob, EAA 1027572, was no stranger to the Beaver. In addition to offering full-service, customized restoration services for the DHC-2, Kenmore Air operates a fleet of Beavers to provide scheduled airline service, charters, and tours in the Washington/British Columbia area.
Kenmore is not far from Abbotsford, the Canadian home of the boxed Beaver, so rather than Mark making the trip from Pennsylvania himself, he let Rob, who has been around Beavers since roughly 1980, appraise the aircraft for him.
“With Rob close by there was no sense in me flying across the country to hold his hand,” Mark said. “He’s the guru of gurus on them. I asked if he would mind, and he said no so I gave him the gentleman’s name.”
When Rob arrived to examine the Beaver, he was impressed right away with the original status of the airplane.
“I was shocked,” Rob said. “It was basically a stock military Beaver that had never been converted. I couldn’t believe it actually. It was a little spotty getting the serial number and paperwork sorted out, but with the help of the local FAA we got it done.”
It took him a while to make sure, but Rob gave Mark the good news that this was an investment definitely worth making.
“He texted me, and it was something like, ‘Oh my God, this is the real deal. I’ll call you later,’” Mark said. “Then he never called. It was hours because he’s doing prebuys, crawling all around, matching up numbers, making sure it is what it’s claimed to be. The next thing I got was a text, and it said, ‘As advertised 100 percent accurate and correct. If you don’t buy it, we’re buying it.’”
Mark didn’t give Kenmore a chance to acquire N591DB and purchased it after some slight haggling. Even discounting the fact that it was made up of a fuselage and some boxes, back then his Beaver did not look like the gorgeous airplane it is today.
“I never saw it,” Mark said. “I saw photos of it. But if you saw it, you’d go, ‘Why in God’s name would you ever buy it?’ It was Army green and someone tried to strip the paint off, so it made it look like it had caught fire.”
The DB in N591DB stands for de Havilland Beaver, but Mark’s wife, Joan, decided it would be more apt if those letters stood for dumpy Beaver the first time the couple saw his new airplane.
“First time I actually saw it was probably a couple months after, and it had been transported from down in B.C. to Kenmore, which is [near] Seattle,” Mark said. “It was like, geez. My wife was with me and she said, ‘Oh my God.’”
Luckily for Mark, the so-called dumpy Beaver wouldn’t be dumpy for too much longer. His friends at Kenmore took great care in restoring his prized floatplane. Rob started work on it, and Eric Ellison, Kenmore director of maintenance, ended up finishing the job when Rob had to travel elsewhere for his work with Kenmore.
“Rob did the purchase and spearheaded the beginning of it, and I’ll say the first year, year and a half, and then Eric Ellison took it over from there,” Mark said. “I mean, there’s 25 people that worked on this plane. Interior people, carpet and motor people, tin people, paint people, instrument people. I have to tell you, it’s the most professional, neat group I’ve ever worked with.”
According to Rob, Kenmore’s advantage in working on the Beaver comes from the company just having more time working on and flying the DHC-2 than anyone else.
“We operate these planes every day,” Rob said. “We’ll put maybe 4,000-5,000 hours on our Beavers this year. That gives us a unique perspective on what really works. And we are very lucky we have such a high skill level of people here. That is the real key, to tell the truth. True craftspeople are hard to come by.”
Rebuilding the Beaver
Mark didn’t have to think hard about his decision to entrust the restoration to Kenmore, and he swears that’s not just because he knows folks who work for the company.
“Kenmore really, I mean they are the number one place in the world for that,” Mark said. “There is no other — and that’s not me selling them, that’s an absolute fact. Anyone that knows the de Havilland aircraft — Beaver, Otters — that’s where you send them to get them redone.”
Rob said that Kenmore has restored more than 150 Beavers — and Mark’s was one of the easier ones because of the intact nature of the airframe.
“The cosmetics on this plane were a little out of what we normally do, but they were a fun challenge,” Rob said. “The basic rebuild on these planes are all the same — few if any original skins and all mechanicals overhauled or new. New cables, wires, switches, hoses, etc.”
In addition to the specialists who worked on his airplane, Mark enjoyed having total input on how he wanted his Beaver. He planned a lot of details and alterations, and Joan handled color selection and designing the interior with the folks at Kenmore.
“There’s interior people, a dad and his daughter,” Mark said. “My wife worked with them because I’m just not a color person. Now when I see it, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty.’ But better her [to choose].”
From its time as a liaison aircraft to current Beavers making treks through Alaska, the DHC-2 is a type often associated with rugged conditions. Mark’s Beaver is proof that not every DHC-2 has to be a bare-bones backcountry flyer.
As a conscientious host, Mark has N591DB equipped with different audio options and iPods for passengers with different playlists loaded, in case they get tired of hearing him talk to ATC on the radio.
“They can participate with the pilot and co-pilot and listen to all that, and if they’re bored to tears with that, I can block them so they don’t have to listen to us,” Mark said. “What I did was bought three or four iPods and loaded different genres of music on them. So ’60s, ’70s, country western. You could ride in one seat, and I can give you an iPod and you just plug it in.”
The musical options aren’t the only unique audio feature in Mark’s Beaver. N591DB is equipped with an Electronics International AV-17 audio diagnostics system that monitors Mark’s oil pressure, fuel pressure, and voltage for any exceedance during flight.
The original Beaver was configured to have eight seats, with multiple people piling into a bench seat and a sling. Mark wasn’t a fan of that layout and decided to sacrifice the number of passengers to increase their comfort.
“I wanted it to be a six-place airplane, not an eight-place airplane because when they were originally built, they had pilot, co-pilot, bench seat, and then a sling,” Mark said. “I didn’t want that. There’s no reason to be doing that, so I have six individual, more like captain’s chairs in there.”
Those captain’s chairs have different cushions and covers for different seasons attached with Velcro. In the colder winter months, he can replace his typical leather seats done by Clarence Kappes of Kenmore Air with a sheepskin variant to keep passengers and pilot alike a bit warmer.
Despite the type’s reputation for being a terrific seaplane, N591DB actually started out on wheels. Mark had Wipline 6100 floats added so he could satisfy his itch for seaplane flying.
The typical Beaver has luggage in a separate section, but Mark wanted a completely redesigned fuselage for his airplane, so Kenmore made it so.
“What we did was we took the rear bulkhead and we moved it back 3 feet into the tail section so the luggage section is actually in the cockpit with you, as opposed to before the luggage area was actually behind the last person, behind the bulkhead, you didn’t see it,” Mark said. “So the cockpit got about 2-1/2 feet bigger.”
With the longer fuselage came more and slightly different windows in N591DB, ones that offer more visibility to everybody inside. The new rear bulkhead features some embroidery of, what else, a happy Beaver.
“The beaver on the back wall, that embroidery has a little LED spotlight that while you’re flying you can turn around and see him smiling,” Mark said, wearing a smile himself.
N591DB has a gorgeous instrument panel, with the gauges and Garmins residing in a laser-cut panel of jeweled metal. The panel contains the standard six-pack, plus a Garmin GTN 650 and GTN 750. The one on the right side of the panel is an engine analyzer for the Beaver’s completely rebuilt 450-hp supercharged R-985 Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior that monitors oil temperature, oil pressure, fuel flow, and more.
“When you get a military motor, it’s very low time,” Mark said. “Although, that doesn’t mean anything because that motor was 10,000 pieces and 100 percent apart and put back together.”
That rebuilt Pratt & Whitney burns, on average, roughly 22 gph. N591DB has three separate fuel tanks in its belly that hold a combined 95 gallons among two 35-gallon tanks and a 25-gallon tank. Each wing has an additional 21.5 gallons for a combined total of 138 gallons. That’s a lot of fuel, even considering the Beaver’s consumption rate. Mark doesn’t push his reserve to the limit and usually flies without loading up the wing tanks.
“When we fly now, it’s always just the belly,” he said. “What we will do is fly 3, 3-1/2 hours, and we will put down, stretch our legs, refuel, take a bathroom break, and that kind of stuff.”
Putting the Beaver to Work
Now that Mark’s Beaver is exactly as he wants it, he’s been putting it and his Cessna 185, also on floats, to use flying around the eastern half of the United States.
“In Pennsylvania, we don’t have a lot of lakes, so anybody that sees that I have two floatplanes asks, ‘Why do you need floatplanes?’” Mark said. “We have a home in the Adirondacks up in New York, on the lake. We fly back and forth to there.”
Mark made a different trip and headed west in July to make his first trip to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. He prepared to submit N591DB for judging and went all out, including bringing T-shirts and a taxidermic beaver like the one embroidered on the airplane’s rear bulkhead.
“I’d never been to Oshkosh,” Mark said. “I’ve always wanted to come but business or something always prevented it for me. So, I was like, I’m going to go and I’m going to show. Hopefully we come away with something. We’ve pulled out all the stops.”
The beautiful Beaver ended up winning something substantial, as N591DB was awarded a Gold Lindy in the Seaplanes category at AirVenture 2018.
“I felt shock — I was ecstatic, proud,” Mark said. “It was unexpected for a first-timer [to win]. I also felt gratitude for the guys at Kenmore for all their great work.”
The category couldn’t be better for Mark, who saw greatness in his (mostly) boxed Beaver right away.
“You had to have some vision and understand that if it’s all there, you can make it whatever you want,” he said. “That’s pretty much how I came by it. Why a Beaver? I’m a floatplane enthusiast. … I just am drawn to water planes.”