7 Years ago the DH8Q400 was introduced in our Company. Since then I have logged about 3000h on the plane. Just an hour ago I landed one with hours and more cycles then all of the SAS planes involved.
My ratings of the DH8Q400
Negatives:
Landing! Even after 3000 or so landings it needs full concentration to achieve a smooth landing at the marker (flaps 15 or 35 don’t matter). And me and most of my colleges needed two years to reach that point. During that time there was a lot of taxing from the runway when your copilot (well CRM trained) pretended not to have noticed that slam dunk you tried to sneak in as a landing.
Turbulence! For a plane with that high wing load she is too nervous in turbulence.
First Years! Every new Plane has problems in the beginning but in the case of the DH8Q400 it took Bombardier a very long time to straiten them out. Until then we had a hard time explaining to passengers why we were leaving the RWY a second time (Central Computer being paranoid about another problem again)
Technical Care! The plane needs a lot of care by experienced staff to keep reliability high.
Positives:
Power! Max TOW, single engine, 1000feet rate. You always feel that there is power when you need it.
Cockpit! Real comfortable situation awareness. WX, Terrain, Approach other Traffic all in one picture. A real help during those no precision, bad WX, no radar, weak ATC approaches which are a main duty of the turboprop fleets.
Crosswind Performance! Like most high wing Props. Absolutely no stress in any crosswind situation.
Approach! The ability to land with cruising RPM even with Flaps 35 takes away a lot of noise in the final approach.
Reliability! Now after all those years of bug hunting the plane has very good completion rate and dispatch reliability. Still it needs a lot of tending and care from technical department.
After all I like the plane. It is the first turboprop able to keep up with the speeds and climb rates of standard jets thus it takes away the uneasy feeling to be in everybody’s way at the bigger HUBS.
Passengers prefer it to other Props - not to Jets so - because of its speed and reasonable quiete Cabin.
It is hard to commend on the resent landing gear problems at SAS. After the first two events my company grounded all planes and inspected the culprit actuator. We were in the air again after a short time and maintenance told us that they had found no dangerous corrosion even on the planes that were older and had more cycles than the involved SAS AC.
Now after the latest accident they tell us that because of that inspection of all gears 3 weeks ago they absolutely trust the reliability of all the gears in the fleet.
Makes sense to me and as I have confidence in the abilities of our maintenance I positively expect to see 3 green in the future.