Fortunately HR, I have only had one engine shut down event in a PT6. And that was with a King Air and the fuel bypass line breaking on take-off. We decided to shut down to avoid a fire.
But that is beside the point, and really, irrelevant.
You can say that they should be limited to flat lands only, but what happens if the engine quits over a wooded area and you can't glide clear? Or over a built up area?
Why is it ok to take 12 people in a caravan on a private op where ever you want to go, but not commercially? Is there suddenly more responsibility on the captain to keep the people safe if they have paid to be there over being invited?
Commercial Viability? I'm sorry, but how is running a twin turbine going to be cheaper than running something like a van?
Initial purchase, running cost, maintenance, insurance, two crew instead of one. It's all a lot more. And then if you aren't putting bums on seats, how are you going to offset that cost?
Again, I go back to my mountainous terrain stuff.
The twin otters cannot operate at max capacity out of these strips. Is the solution to try and run them at half, or one third capacity, when a caravan can get in and out easily, and economically?
How about when one donk quits on the twin otter. What is its maximum ceiling when it is fully loaded? The Mountains that I am flying in at the moment are 16,000ft. Is that any safer than a caravan?
Without aircraft like the Caravan, these communities will lose their lifelines to the outside world. It really is that simple.
Am I advocating that we should do away with twins and fly single engine aircraft everywhere? No, of course not.
There is always going to be the argument that 2 engines are better than 1, but then again, 4 engines are better than 2. And 8 are better than 4.
And for as long as there are single engine aircraft, these incidents are always going to happen.
All we can hope for is that accidents like this one are not caused by something as simple as poor maintenance and corner cutting in the name of cost saving.