Fairchild Metroliner SA227-AC Metro III

The Metro III is where the aircraft stopped being limited by the rule it was born under. Initially certified in 1980 at 14,000 pounds and later raised to 14,500 as engines and structure improved — with an option as high as 16,000 — it gained three metres of wingspan, four-bladed propellers, quick-access engine cowlings and a collection of drag-reducing refinements including landing gear doors that close once the gear is down. Nothing revolutionary taken singly; together, a different aeroplane.

At a little over eighteen metres long and seventeen in span, the Metro III carries two pilots and nineteen passengers in single seats either side of an aisle that must be walked stooped. It cruises at more than five hundred kilometres per hour, a high figure for a turboprop of its size, and that was always its commercial argument against the Beechcraft 1900: block speed over short sectors. Range, by contrast, is modest, consistent with a machine built for one-hour radii.

The Metro III became the Metroliner. From it came the American C-26A, the SA227-BC built almost exclusively for AeroLitoral, the executive Merlin IVC, the Expediter freighter and the belly-radome surveillance machines that patrolled the Caribbean. Australia took to it with particular enthusiasm: since the first of the family arrived in 1975, close to twenty per cent of the world fleet has operated there.