De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter

The Twin Otter is a tough, simple aircraft that flies the hardest routes in aviation, and its record reflects the routes more than the aircraft. Most of its fatal crashes are flights into mountains in cloud, in Nepal, Papua and the Andes. On flat island hops and seaplane transfers with a good operator, the picture is very different.

Where you fly on a Twin Otter

The DHC-6 Twin Otter is a 19-seat, twin-engined turboprop with fixed landing gear and a high wing, built to take off and land in a few hundred metres. De Havilland Canada built it from 1965 to 1988, and Viking Air restarted production of the modernised Series 400 in 2010. About 990 have been built and about 500 are still in use.

You may meet one on a Maldives seaplane transfer, the beach landing at Barra in Scotland with Loganair, the short runway on Saba in the Caribbean with Winair, inter-island flights in the Seychelles, mountain routes in Nepal such as Pokhara to Jomsom, or on research and supply flights in Antarctica and the Canadian Arctic. It flies on wheels, skis and floats.

The fatal record

Our data lists 195 fatal Twin Otter events from 1966 to 7 October 2026. 129 count toward the score: accidents on passenger flights. Most happened before 2000: about 140 of the 195 events are from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Since 2010 there have been 10 counted fatal passenger accidents. The worst ones since 2000:

• 27 July 2000, Royal Nepal Airlines, Jarayakhali Hill, Nepal: all 25 died.
• 24 March 2001, Air Caraïbes, St Barthélemy: on the short hop from St Maarten, the aircraft rolled and hit a house on final approach; all 19 on board and one person on the ground died.
• 9 August 2007, Air Moorea, off Moorea, French Polynesia: the aircraft dived into the sea just after take-off on a short hop to Tahiti. All 20 died. French investigators found that the cable that pulls the elevator up had broken, worn through at a cable guide.
• 8 October 2008, Yeti Airlines, Lukla, Nepal: crashed on approach in fog. 18 of 19 died.
• 15 December 2010, Tara Air, Okhaldhunga, Nepal: all 22 died.
• 24 February 2016, Tara Air 193, Myagdi, Nepal: all 23 died on the Pokhara–Jomsom route.
• 29 May 2022, Tara Air 197, Sanosware, Nepal: all 22 died, again on the Jomsom route.

The worst Twin Otter accident in our data was a Mission Aviation Fellowship flight in Papua New Guinea on 17 December 1994, with 28 dead.

The airframe or the routes?

Air Moorea is the rare case where a failure in the aircraft caused the crash. Nearly all the others follow the same pattern: a flight continues into cloud in a narrow valley, often with one approach option, no radar and weather that changes in minutes. Nepal, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea alone account for 49 events. No other aircraft could fly most of those routes either.

We group the Twin Otter with classic turboprops in our methodology, a group with the weakest record, partly because of where these aircraft fly. Our flight counts for the Twin Otter come from a fleet model, because flight-tracking networks see few of them, so treat the per-flight comparison as rough. Compare the Let L-410 and the Cessna Caravan, which fly similar missions.

How to tell if you are on one, and what to do

Flight trackers show DHC6 for every series (100, 200, 300 and 400). You will see a boxy fuselage, a high straight wing with two engines, and fixed landing gear.

On mountain routes, take the earliest flight of the day, when winds and cloud are usually calmer. Accept cancellations without argument; a crew that waits for the weather is doing its job. On a seaplane transfer, listen to the briefing on how to open the exits, because a capsized floatplane fills fast.