"You may joke about the shortage of power, and yes I have flown them. The Gipsy version was a lot more spritely and there was a Continental powered one as well.
But, find anything newer that can carry 4 people in relative comfort on 2x90hp??"
Good heavens! I had no idea my little opus would generate so much interest!
I am unaware of a Continental powered variant. Was this a Woodley thing or a much later retrofit? The radial Continentals would have been too powerful so I imagine that it must have been a flat sawmill engine. I recently saw a DH114 with this type of conversion and it looked as ugly as hell. The Gemini was, by any standards, a pretty aircraft but to my mind, seemed to have an air of vulnerability. This probably is unjust and borne of lingering memories of practice engine failures after take-off. Also watching passengers like a hawk to make sure they did not step on the trailing flaps. I never flew one but I imagine the de Havilland engined types had a vastly superior performance.
The Gemini, like the Proctor, Messenger, Magister, Auster and a host of small production aircraft were very much products of their own time. Most were post-war designs or developments of wartime communications aircraft. Strangely, de Havilland did not continue their Moth series after the war. Rationing, National Service and a particularly austere post-war economy, not to mention the numbers of aircraft coming off military secondments, made life really difficult for British manufacturers. To some extent, they had a protected market in the Empire but the dissolution of this coincided with the burgeoning of American exports and with no support from successive governments, the industry just quietly slipped away to leave the field to Piper and Cessna.
And no, I know of nothing of later vintage that might be comparable (2 X 90hp) - I suppose the Apache might be a sort of contender but that was a dog to fly in comparison with the gentle, responsive and, yes, tender Gemini. But people saw things differently in those days; I mentioned the sexy landing light. The pants of a Miles Falcon or the spats of a Percival Gull were akin to the allure of a couple of straight seams on a pair of stockings . . . . . Perhaps it was just me (!) - but I have never been similarly stirred by any trans-Atlantic offering save the Beech and Lockheed twin-tails which were rather different animals anyway.
But in self defence, I should claim that my rose tinted glasses are not sufficiently strong to make the Prentice any less ugly than it was.
